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(BACKING
OUR CREATIVITY SYMPOSIUM,
Melbourne, 13-14 September, 2005)
©
Donald Richardson, 2005
Abstract
The assessment (marking/grading) of students' art has long
been a matter of professional concern. How can one put a finite,
arithmetical value on something as ingenuous as a child's freely-expressed
painting? Is it ethical to do so, even?
With the current national emphasis on reporting assessments,
it is important that art teachers and lecturers adopt the right
methods in the best interests of their students.
This paper examines the following issues:
* whether it is ethical to judge and mark/assess students' art
at all
* the use of ranking, grading, marking etc
* different kinds of report
* the structure of knowledge of the subject
It recommends that products of an art-learning experience be
not assessed solely - or even mainly - as finished products,
and/or according to the teacher's or lecturer's personal taste,
but objectively as indicators of each individual student's learning
in and about the subject.
It also examines the relative merits of different systems of
reporting student learning, attitude and achievement in visual
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'There is no disputing taste', the old saying goes -
but, actually, we dispute each others' taste in, and judgments
about, art all the time. While this may be no more than an amusing
game in the lives of adults most of the time, it is a very serious
matter in education because student learning depends upon consistent
and positive feedback. If art teachers and lecturers evaluate
students' art products purely according to their own personal
tastes - and award marks or grades accordingly - their assessments
are likely to be inconsistent with those of other teachers or
lecturers and the resulting impression of institutional adventitiousness
is likely to inhibit students' confidence in the subject. This
is a most undesirable outcome at the school level and it may
ruin the very lives of tertiary students.
The assessment of student art has always been a matter of great
professional concern at every level. Should it be rated in relation
to established, professional artists? Should it be graded in
relation to class peers? What criteria should be used in assessing
the art of elementary and primary children? Is it ethical to
assess and mark young children's art at all? What allowance -
if any - should be made for 'talent'?
(You probably all know Schulz's cartoon in which Lucy is given
a 'C' for her coat-hanger sculpture.)
The general confusion has not been ameliorated by recent discussion
about student reporting emanating from the Commonwealth Department
of Education and Training. In fact, it has brought about an urgency
to come to terms with the problem once and for all.
__________________________________________________
This paper is based on three premises. The first is that
what should be assessed in art classes is not the aesthetic value
of the works produced but the amount of student learning
the works exhibit. Schools and universities are not art galleries,
but learning institutions. Students (the unwilling notwithstanding)
are in school to learn - in Art as in Science, Mathematics,Literature
etc - not just to have aesthetic experiences (although we hope
the experience of art will be a rewarding one). The second is
that educational assessment is a diagnostic tool which
indicates to both teacher and student the path future learning
should take. Thus, feedback to the student (i.e., reporting)
should be framed in such a way as not to discourage further engagement
in learning. The third is that it is the individual student
who learns and whose progress is mapped by assessment.
The teaching-learning principle this paper supports as
appropriate to learning in and about art is similar to the concept
of 'personal best' performance in athletics. The individual student
is assessed in relation to his/her previous 'performance' and
not in relation to class averages or other norms. It requires
that students are not competitively ranked against each other
and that reporting avoids labelling any student 'failure' until
the time comes for a final grading - i.e., at the end of a schooling
period, be it a term, a year or the final year of schooling.
Of course, this depends upon the teacher/lecturer having - and
the students understanding - a programme that clearly defines
learning increment.
Given the foregoing, there can be no ethical objection to assessing
student learning in art at any level; in fact, the student -
and all students in the class - will know as well as the teacher/lecturer
what learning has occurred.
School is not a horse-race, designed to seek out the one winner
and 'the devil take the hindmost'. Contrary to what some contemporary
politicians seem to think, schools are concerned to facilitate
the learning of all students, not just the 'winners'.
'Nothing succeeds like success', but nothing discourages like
failure either.
When teachers/lecturers assess, they are not acting as art critics
or competition judges but as educators. This means that
what they should be assessing and reporting on is student
learning in and about art. This makes assessment more equitable
for the students (because untalented students have as much chance
of achieving good grades as the talented ones do - more so, if
they learn more; we all know students with a talent in a limited
field, like cartooning, who rest on this and absolutely resist
learning anything else) and also less of a hassle for teachers
as well (because they can put aside their personal tastes and
prejudices).
The distinction between assessment and reporting
As elementary as it may seem, this is a distinction worth
making because these are two very different functions with different
purposes, but they are often conflated in practice.
We can enter this discussion by noting that those teachers who
claim they 'do not assess' art are not being entirely honest
with themselves. It is not possible for any conscious human (or
any organism, really) not to be assessing and evaluating
his/her environment all the time. If you ask these teachers for
an opinion on any of the students that are 'not' being assessed,
he/she will usually offer an opinion (i.e., will report an assessment).
So, what is actually meant by the claim not to assess students'
work is that the teacher is just not reporting the assessment
that he/she has made - for whatever reason.
Different kinds of report
But, we must recognise that teachers are continually reporting
their assessment to students as part of the normal teaching-learning
process. When a teacher comments to a student 'that's good' or
'why don't you try more blue in the background?' he/she is reporting
to the student the result of an assessment - in a normal, natural
way that is designed to help the learning process.
This informal, personal reporting is educationally sound and
the most humane kind of report; however, it is not always used
to the best advantage. A report,if it is to be of any use to
its recipient, should contain appraisals that can be explained
and justified and also give an indication of how improvement
can be made. If all the students in a class are told 'that's
OK' or 'that's interesting' - that is, if they all get the same
report, and a report that gives very little assistance on how
to improve or to learn more - they will lose all confidence in
the teacher's ability to help them learn. Students are aware
that they are not identical with each other, that their works
are not identical, and that art is about individuality and creativeness.
But what schools normally regard as 'reports' are the formal
cards or documents given to students at the end of an assessment
period. Whereas it is clear that the informal, personal report
is intended for the student and to assist his/her learning, it
is not absolutely clear for whom the school report is intended
and what purpose it is intended to serve. Is it for the student
(and, therefore, not to be divulged to his/her classmates, parents,
prospective employers, etc)? Or is it for the parents (and not
to be divulged to prospective employers, for example)? Or for
the student and the parents (and no others)? Or?
Students, their parents, the teachers of the students, prospective
employers, and the school administration itself all need reports
on the progress of students, but it is hard to see how one report
can fulfill the specific needs of all of them. The kind of report
students need is described above. Parents, on the other hand,
need to know (or ought to) how their child is 'getting on', how
he/she compares with others in the class, whether the home environment
can assist learning better, whether remedial work is needed at
home, and whether the student is "good", cooperative,etc.
Teachers need to know what action they should take to improve
their teaching technique. The school administration needs to
know whether the student should be promoted or directed into
another course etc. Institutions or other schools a student might
move to need to know about his/her past performance. And prospective
employers need to know what propensities a student may have that
could apply to particular jobs.
Norm-referenced and criterion-referenced assessment
Most assessment of students since schools began has been
what we now know as norm-referenced assessment. This means that
the group being assessed is evaluated, graded or marked against
a standard or norm,which is usually the average mark of all students
in the group. The norm is the 'pass mark' i.e., 50% or 5/10,
or C in a five-letter scale.
In norm-referenced assessment, approximately half the students
score above the norm and approximately half score below it (unless
'pass mark' is set at 40%, 4/10 or D, as is sometimes the case).
But, wherever 'pass' is set, under norm-referenced assessment
a significant number of students must fail. When we consider
that about half of the students in any cohort will go right through
their schooling never achieving a pass mark in any subject, we
must recognise that the use of this method can only be justified
educationally at the end of a specified learning period. This
is its justification in Year 12 examinations.
And, to relate this more specifically to Art:
* how do you establish a norm for a Year 11 class when six of
them have not done art since year 8, three of them are clearly
of tertiary-quality and the rest average year 11s who have taken
the subject in years 9 and 10?
* how do you assess the one or two exceptionally talented students
in relation to the norm? Is it right that they should always
get high marks, even if they don't try or if they learn little?
And,what does this do to the rest of the students?
But norm-referencing is not the only way. In criterion-referenced
assessment the teacher sets a task and students and teachers
alike know the criterion by which achievement will be assessed.
The advantage of this concept is that the criterion can be set
at a level to suit the abilities, age, standard or previous experience
of each individual student. Comparison with peers does not come
into it at all, whereas it is all-important in norm-referencing.
This means that every student, whether 'talented' or not, can
achieve an A or B reasonably often and, thus, receive the positive
reinforcement necessary for successful and enjoyable learning.
And, if the criteria refer to learning in and about art, it also
means that the talented student who coasts along on his/her drawing
ability(for example) will get no more As than the average student
because the learning of each is emphasised at a level appropriate
for each. To give an example: if the objective of a particular
lesson is to learn the skills of making linocuts and the 'talented'
drawer of horses trots out his/her usual clever drawing in an
unprintable form, he/she fails the criterion (and gets a D),
whereas an untalented student who uses a less impressive motif,
but produces a printable block, gets an A.
Another way of avoiding educationally unsound personal comparisons
is to make the criterion a measure of how much better a student
is at a particular task now than he/she was at the beginning
of the assessment period. This is sometimes called self-referenced
assessment. For example, in a term spent on landscape painting,
the student's first effort is compared with his/her last and,
if the increment of learning shown in the works themselves and
revealed through discussion with the student is sufficient, any
student may receive an A or B.
In criterion-referenced assessment, the student still has grades
or marks but it will not be valid to use them to make comparisons
of different students, and this may make criterion-referenced
assessment of little use to school administrations, except when
they need normative data to decide which group a student should
be promoted into etc. So, norm-referenced data must be provided
for this purpose. But the two should never be confused and students
and their parents must know the difference and it must be public
knowledge whether an assessment has been norm- or criterion-referenced.
It should, for instance, be indicated on all reports. If it is
not,everyone assumes the grades have been norm-referenced, because
that is how it has been ever since.
It is also essential that students know which system is being
used because, otherwise, they might receive encouraging results
all the term and a low assessment at the end because the former
was criterion-referenced and the latter norm-referenced. This
sort of thing often happens in art assessment because a teacher
has pushed up the marks during the term to encourage the student
only to find that norm-referencing must occur finally. There
will be no problem with this if the students, the teacher and
the parents know what kind of assessment is occurring at each
stage.
Quartiles and A-E Scale
Recent calls from the federal Minister for Education and
Training for the national adoption of reporting student assessments
in both quartiles and A-B-C-D-E grading requires comment.
Quartiles (as the name suggests) is a four-stage ranking of students
in one or other of the 0-10%, 11%-50%, 51%-75% and 76%-100% ranges
of marks. We will not discuss here how students find themselves
in any of these ranges; however, it is imperative that we recognise
that, using quartiles (as with any use of percentages), it is
inevitably that approaching 50% of students are likely to be
'failures' - and the educational implications of this have already
been discussed under norm-referenced assessment. In A-E rankings,
on the other hand, a large percentage of students in a cohort
(perhaps the largest) will be ranked C, with a smaller percentage
falling into the A, B, D and E categories. Only those in the
latter two could regard themselves in any sense as 'failures',
so this system has greater educational relevance than the quartile
system.
But, insisting on both being used simultaneously (on the
grounds that this would be 'plain English' reporting) is not
only illogical and confusing but educationally unjustifiable
because the A-E scale is a five-part division (into quintiles)
whereas quartiles is a four-part division. This means (as the
diagram shows) that about half of students ranked C will join
the Ds and Es as 'fails' because their marks are below 50%, which
is educationally unjustifiable.
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grades: / A / B / C / D / E /
quartiles: / 1st / 2nd / 3rd / 4th /
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Assessment of learning and assessment of attitude
Art teachers have often tried to ameliorate the unhappy effects
of norm-referenced assessment regimes by including an assessment
of student attitude in a report. Sometimes this is done by adding
an unidentified loading for 'trying' to the assessment. This
is not a sound practice because, unless the two components of
the assessment are identified,the report will give a distorted
picture of both the amount of learning and the amount of effort
put into the activity.
If reports are to be given at all they should at least contain
meaningful information to learners (and their parents) on how
they can improve their learning.
But an even less justifiable practice is to identify a separate
assessment for attitude or behaviour which is then combined statistically
with the assessment of learning. As the following table shows,
three quite different students can get the same grade from this
process. The final (average) C, which would be all that would
appear on each of the three students' reports, gives no useful
information to anyone.
_________________________________________________________________
Assessment of Learning Attitude, Behaviour, etc Total(Average)
Student 1 A E C
Student 2 E A C
Student 3 C C C
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This is not to say that an assessment or comment on student attitude
should not be given - it should, because positive reinforcement
can be provided in this way. But it should not be conflated with
the assessment of learning.
Types of Learning
Art is an omnibus subject, involving several different concepts
and activities and, therefore, different types of learning. The
'structure of knowledge' of the subject may be categorised as
* Learning as an artist or designer. This is the creative aspect
of the subject, usually involving making works - functional works
(works of design) or non-functional, purely aesthetic,
works (works of art)
* Learning as a craftsperson. This involves the skills
necessary to practice as either artist or designer. It is a useful
aspect of the subject at the school level for students who, for
whatever reason, are not 'creative' because they benefit from
practising the skills for their own sakes.
* Learning as a consumer or critic. This is the study of works
produced by others - usually famous works - and need not involve
any practice at all. 'Art Appreciation' classes come into this
category, all those who 'appreciate' art being consumers of art.
Criticism here does not mean professional art journalism but
the ability to talk and write coherently about works. This is
an important aspect of student learning in art because few will
become practitioners, but all are potentially part of the public
for art and design.
It is logical to assess each of these aspects separately, but
- for practical purposes - it may be appropriate to combine them
into the one grade or mark.
The specification of criteria in advance and sound teaching-learning
practice go hand-in-hand. Specifying criteria for learning must
bean integral part of programming, if teaching is aimed at anything
more than 'an experience'. How do you assess a 'paint anything
you like' lesson? If students are set this task, how can any
get less than A grades if they do just that? In such lessons,
in practice, teachers usually assess the work on some private
criteria of their own - often,even, the criterion is that of
adult art, or some other measure of quality of which the student
is not appraised.
Teaching and learning should be as goal-directed in art as in
any other subject, and assessment-of learning according to known
criteria is not inimical to the subject if those criteria genuinely
reflect its nature.
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