TED 633- Week 3, Assignment 3A

:: Pre-Assessment Analysis ::

I have used all of my pre-assessments before. I use them daily in my classroom as I’m introducing new concepts. I used all of these assessments in my class during the first semester. In this particular unit plan, I was looking at scales as the major emphasis. The pre-assessments also serve as a refresher and a reminder of the information learned in previous class sessions. One of my least favorite ones is the one from day 2 “Have students perform the scale without a warm-up on the scale to test their “cold” proficiency on the scale.” I don’t find this to be a good example of authentic assessment. Considering we spend a valuable part of the rehearsal warming up. We are constantly reinforcing the importance of the warm up, and making a connection between the warm up and the rehearsal. Also, a student would never walk into an audition and be asked to play all of it cold, especially scales. Part of an audition is always a cold sight read, but to do it so isolated, probably isn’t the most effective. Also, if you were going to sight read a piece at an audition, you would most likely run yourself through the scale the piece is related to, as well as even identify and finger though a few of the more difficult passages before actually beginning to play.

I do like that the pre-assessments I have listed because they build on one another pretty methodically. These pre-assessments are directly tied to the rubric, as the pre-assessments provide the connection of prior knowledge to the new knowledge to be learned in the coming rehearsal. The pre-assessments are also directly linked to the musical proficiency that the students are assessed on in the rubric.

Musical proficiency is perhaps the most objective criteria in the assessment. Each quarter students are given assignments that they need to be able to perform. This could be a set of scales in different key signatures, an etude, or a passage of music from repertoire that we are currently working on in class. Rhythm and pitch is either correct or incorrect, so students get a numerical grade next to each category depending on how he or she performed. The numbers are then tallied up on a rubric to calculate how a student did overall. This helps students discover their strengths and areas they need to improve on. For instance, a student may excel at producing great tone quality, but score poorly on sight-reading and rhythm.