In a piece in Education Week, Sara Mead maintains that art can be assessed through multiple-choice standardized tests.
In defense of multiple-choice testing of the arts, she writes:
The point of arts education shouldn’t be to teach children to simply “enjoy art”–we are, after all free to choose which art we enjoy, or whether we enjoy it at all. Rather, it should be to give children the skills and background knowledge to experience art or music in an informed and more than superficial sense–much of which is about understanding and identifying concepts, vocabulary, and techniques in ways that can be assessed through multiple choice assessments. A major reason that high-quality education needs to include the arts is certain arts-related information–such as names and work of key artists and composers, specific musical or artistic vocabulary and meanings, and artistic movements over time and their relationship to broader historical and social trends–is key cultural knowledge that our students need to be culturally literate. But arts and music instruction in our schools has often ignored cultural literacy and key concepts in favor of performance and “creativity.”
I don’t agree.
I understand and embrace the idea of cultural literacy, but I don’t think that multiple-choice standardized tests are the best way to teach it or to assess it. If a teacher of music wants students to understand the differences between Mozart and Schoenberg, the best way to do that is to listen to their music and discuss the differences. If the teacher of the arts wants students to understand the differences between classical Greek and Roman architecture, the best way to do it is to view it and discuss it. Picking a bubble is no substitute nor is it a valuable way to learn about art.
It is easy to memorize the names and work of key artists and composers to prepare for a test, and just as easy to forget them when the test is over.
If we want our students to have important cultural knowledge as part of their cultural literacy, we should expose them to the experience that this knowledge represents. We should encourage them to see, feel, hear, and engage with the art or music of other times and places. To the extent that they experience arts as a part of life–their own as well as its creator–they will remember it and have it as part of their own experience.
There is something in a bubble test that is inherently at odds with the arts. One can indeed test for superficial recall, not only in the arts but in other subjects as well. And there are times when it is useful to know the results of large-scale assessment. NAEP is valuable, for example, in providing a snapshot of the state of reading, math, science, history and other subjects. But it is only a snapshot. And the results that are informative for a nation, a state, or a district are less informative and less valid for individual students. For the purposes of large-scale assessment, multiple-choice standardized testing is useful and cheap.
But if it is understanding and discernment that we value, there is not a good case to be made for multiple-choice standardized testing. If it is learning that we care about, there is not a good case to be made for multiple-choice, standardized testing. If it is individual children that we care about, then we want to know what they have learned and what they understand. Conceptual knowledge does not lend itself to bubble tests.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why does she have “creativity” in quotations marks? Does she not believe there is such a thing?!
Good point. I report, you decide.
I use quotations marks to imply a different, perhaps subtle change in meaning that is harder to get across in written discourse than in a live spoken “discourse”. Here I use the second “discourse” in a slightly different meaning as usually we would talk/write about a spoken dialogue/conversation/discussion and discourse is more reserved for the written word even though in its broadest meaning discourse includes all aspects of communication and practices involved in a topic/subject/content area.
Her “creativity” I believe is meant to be a snarky attack on those who believe it is a vital and valid component of education. It’s an attack against those of us who realize that not all (well, really none) of teaching and learning can broken down and “measured”. (There they are again.)
The IB does wonderful assessment in the arts. Students describe their work to Arts examiners who discuss their selected pieces with them. They also create a research notebook in which they write and reflect upon their growth as an artist and the work they produce. Uplifting and Inspirational.
Excellent response! Glad you “get” it… hoping this is contagious!
JM
Each year every elementary student in our district is assessed in art using a 20 question multiple choice test. I can only imagine the cost of assessing the 6 to 700 students I teach using an IB style test. While the data generated from such a test would be a truer picture if what students learned, the multiple choice test is a more cost effective method of generating a number used to “measure” a students progress and a teachers effectiveness. And in the end cost is what truly drives education.
Absolutely, Carol! I am IB and AP trained and both systems assess art with a portfolio. A bubble test would fundamentally change the nature of the class. Ms. Mead assumes that students will explore art on their own and find what they enjoy but my experience with my students is that they are in contact with very little art and have no exposure other than Da Vinci and Michelangelo. They also do not know how to use the elements and principles of design to express their thoughts and feelings effectively but will not learn that with a bubble test. Also, multiple choice tests are ultimately conformistic vertical and left brained while true art is right-brained, horizontal and non-conformist. Besides, the “art authorities” tend to lag a couple of generations behind what “real” artists are doing. I can imagine them saying, “I’m sorry, Mr. Picasso, but you have no sense of the human figure.” “Mr, Van Gogh, you have to stop using so much yellow.” Portfolios with a rubric is the only way to go but the state would not be willing to spend the money. IB sends a certified assessor to each school for a week to evaluate everyone’s portfolios. Think of that multiplied by every high school, middle school and elementary school in Florida. What would happen if students did not pass the bubble test? Would they flunk the class? Not get credit? If they ever start doing that in Palm Beach County, I will retire.
“Portfolios with a rubric”. Eliminate the rubric part and I agree with you.
Much as we are killing the love and excitement of reading with standardized bubble tests we will do the same with the arts if we relegate their value to regurgitating answers on multiple-choice tests.
I still remember being in a bookstore a 2 summers ago looking for new books for my classroom library and watching a young boy excitedly reading a chapter book he had chosen. When his mother came up to him she examined the book and said “This isn’t on your AR( Accelerated Reading computerized testing program) list — you can’t get it.” He reluctantly abandoned the book and took the “approved, testable” book list from his mother and started looking again but with no enthusiasm anymore.
I was so saddened by this situation but I’ve experienced it often. I also remember well the dictate from a superintendent in a Title I district I worked in that explained that crayons, markers, drawing, painting, and other artistic responses were no longer acceptable and would not be tolerated in classrooms because they didn’t add value to the learning process and were “busy work” that robbed precious time from test prep. All class time must be spent preparing for the reading, writing, and math tests period.
This is what we have done to education in America and there seems no end to it. I weep for the children, especially the poorest among us.
What a sad story.
Our elementary school has a “young author’s fair” every year, and every May, all the kids in grade K-6 have written and illustrated some sort of short story. The results are bound in some fashion as books. I always enjoy my own child’s, of course, but I also love reading the books the other kids created. The range of expression is wonderful and every year I am pleasantly impressed by the liveliness and wonder of a book written by a child who is not at the top of the test score heap. Watching the sophistication of the language and the illustrations grow over the years is my favorite part of attending the end of the year festival.
It’s not on the test. It’s much more important than the test, IMHO.
I have several “publishing celebrations” throughout the school year. My current principal even comes. Lots of parents and grandparents show up as well as kids from other classes and the kids love sharing their published writing.
I wonder how much longer this will be allowed with the Common Core emphasis on expository writing as more meaningful and useful in the business world. Hardly think that anyone wants to celebrate the writing of a business plan but what do I know? LOL
I “get” the idea of a multiple-choice exam to test for specifics. Honestly, I see this as a way to “pitch” the value of art to outside assessors, testing agencies, reformers, etc., who need this type of “objective” evidence in order to sway them into funding art in schools. The effort is one of desperation, an appeal to the people who have the money to save our schools.
Yes, I am giving this teacher the “benefit of the doubt” because I have to believe she doesn’t really believe this type of “assessment” is meaningful to the students or the teachers. Who can gauge the way art moves? Describing art and the process of creation is the way to realize its impact on a student. What about the process of collaboration that so much art requires? What about having a student describe the reasons s/he chose water colors over acrylic?
The multiple-choice test is unimaginative and runs counter to the creativity art encourages and demands.
http://www.theglobalroundhouse.com
@GlobalJackie
The suggested concepts and assessments described by Sara Meade are appropriate for an art history class–even an art appreciation class in middle school or high school–a class where there is an expectation for an intellectualized approach to art. Vocabulary, names of artists, periods of art (Deco, dada, etc.), techniques, methods. But art classes for the general student population–classes that allow children to create art, to experience mixing colors, to try out various materials, to make a collage, to try out a still life rendition–this is what is meaningful to kids who do not get this kind of experience anywhere else in their lives. This is where one learns that I CAN MAKE ART.
Please know that you don’t have to give Sara Mead the benefit of any doubt. She isn’t a teacher. Her bio lists no teaching experience (http://www.newamerica.net/people/sara_mead).
She’s a late 20s/early 30s-ish policy analyst specializing in school “reform” and charters, and a rising star among those who are working to dismantle public schools. She’s already had a number of high-profile positions in various think tanks which advocate for and promote school privitization.
She is a personal friend of Dana Goldstein, who you might remember from a few posts back. She is also the fiance (though maybe by now they are married) to Matthew Yglesias, who currently writes for Slate. The three of them have a little echo chamber going, which is
why I am not as sanguine as our hostess is about Dana ever seeing the light. (Yes, I spend way too much time reading blogs!)
Checked out the link, thanks for that. No wonder her commentary sounds so policy driven. These reformers really suck the learning out of education.
The thing that scares me the most about arts assessments is that national standards for the arts won’t be far behind. At the heart of this will be some panel of non-educators deciding for the masses “what art is” and what it means to appreciate this. I don’t have a problem with the standards that are in place for students pursuing top end AP and IB arts courses. However, as we have seen with attempts to promulgate national standards for social studies and science, politics will absolutely come into play. The last thing we need is a political body standardizing art.
As a visual artist and community art teacher who just spent the last two years in a master of art education program, I can tell you that standardized tests do indeed miss the mark on what is important for students to learn in art.
I agree that portfolio assessment is necessary and useful for juniors and seniors in high school. But not, via bubble tests or by comparing work to what is deemed “good work”. Art is subjective, after all.
In the elementary and middle school grades, the point of art education is not to produce mini masters or make sure all students can memorize the principles of art and design. The point is for students to explore their own identities and their place in the world. It’s to express themselves, explore possibilities, take risks and embrace mistakes along the way. This sort of learning and growth can not be bubble tested.
If we go down this road of assessing art in this manner, we will suck the joy out of the art class experience. Sara Mead’s post is proof that these reformers don’t understand what children should learn from the arts. Thank you for once again being the voice of reason, Diane.
Quite. I would add that Ms. Mead’s argument reflects a broader split (and I would say misapprehension) about learning itself. From my point of view (as a parent and school advocate), learning is not about memorizing facts and algorithms. Even, and perhaps most especially, in the arts. Instead, we teach children these subjects in order to open them to new ideas, other perspectives, alternate frames, and to encourage them to find new and creative ways to work with the world around them. For me, to boil all these subjects – including math and science! – down to bubble tests is to take away from them the most critical elements of developing future citizens and productive members of the community. But I suppose that may be part of the point.
Hi Diane ~
I am a teacher and an artist. I don’t know which came first, but I do know they work hand in hand together. I work in a high poverty school in an inclusion kindergarten. I did my student teaching in a full inclusion school with two “Emotional Behavior Disorder” programs of children included in the general population of “typical” children.
In both instances, the ONLY time I have absolutely ZERO behavior challenges crop up, is when I am teaching an art lesson that allows children to be creative.
My principal has come in to observe this magic phenomena, as have other teachers, only to see troubled children smiling, engaged, cooperative, collaborating, and learning without resistance.
Pre-schoolers through adults have learned ALL subjects through integrated art lessons, sometimes including music, and movement. They have learned with joy vs drudgery. And yes, they have DISCUSSED their learning, but it has also become part of their “muscle memory”.
I recently posted on Twitter about beautiful crocheted coral reefs and the art of adult women who learned a way to discover a hyperbolic math formula that was yet to be able to be worked out by the best mathematicians.
I am hoping this link embeds the Ted-Talk, but if not, you can access it here: http://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_wertheim_crochets_the_coral_reef.html
Christine Wertheim and Margaret Wertheim of the Institute For Figuring have started this ongoing project. This integration of feminine art form, higher geometry, environmentalism, and science is found around the world now, but what I loved most besides its beauty was Margaret’s suggestion in the end of her Ted-Talk: She suggested that we create “Play Tanks” instead of “Think Tanks” for real reform.
The integration of learning is lost when we compartmentalize and narrow curriculum. Children and adults learn best when we DO. Yes, critical thinking, reading, writing, science, and math are all important. But when integrated with the arts through play, the learning is not only effortless — like play —- but becomes a muscle memory and one that does not have to be forced. We are automatically drawn to the learning and engagement.
As for bubble tests: I have a suggestion. Let’s create a bubble test art installation in every school. These bubble test forms need to become a piece of history, a thing of the past. These forms can be used creatively by artists, children and adults alike to create collage, sculpture, furniture, multi-media art forms, wall hangings, paper cutting, — watercolor, acrylic, oil paintings, sumi-e painting — music – though the notes are limited by A,B,C,D – perhaps someone can get creative – dance costumes, drama costumes, and anything else you can think of!
Join me in creating art out of bubble tests! That is the ONLY good purpose for bubble tests!
Where shall we begin installing them? Perhaps in every Department of Education as protest art! Opt Out and Create Opt Out Art!
One of the exercises they use in the art classes at the community college is to have group midterms, where everyone presents a work and the class evaluates it. Certain words are forbidden: you may not say it is “good” or that you like it.
Instead, there is a list of suggested words, and a whole group of ideas to walk down. Words that come up are the use of negative space, movement around a piece, the use of light and shadow, contrast, the emotion it generates, the story it tells. The artist is not allowed to talk until the end.
It taught me to look at objects very differently, and it obviously expands everyone’s vocabulary. I find that using this technique is really important when reacting to art my daughter brings home, because it tells her I’m *really looking* at what she did, when I say, “I feel so warm from the rays you drew coming off your sun” or “I enjoy the way your lines make my eyes move around the hillside” instead of merely, “This is beautiful.” It also helps her see me as someone who gives her real and constructive feedback because I can say something different and meaningful about each drawing, honoring her work and yet also being able to help her get past her frustration when she can’t draw something exactly the way she wanted to.
Art history is art history. It is not art.
Similarly, science history is science history. It is not science. You can be a great scientist without knowing the date Niels Bohr received the Nobel Prize or first postulated his atomic model.
I should add, I don’t mean to denigrate art history. There is much to learn there and it is a great source of study all on its own. This is an essay discussing how art, and an artist most of us haven’t heard of, changed US history:
http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/2aa/2aa543.htm
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Through his painted evocations of breathtaking scenery in the American West, Thomas Moran played a decisive role in the establishment by Congress of the National Park System. At the age of 34, Moran traveled to Yellowstone in 1871 at the invitation of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The paintings that resulted from that trip set the tone for the remainder of his career, according to Eleanor Harvey, DMA Curator of American Art. “His watercolors, engravings, etchings, and oil paintings would grace the pages of guidebooks published by the railroads to promote tourism to the American West, ” said Dr. Harvey. (left: Thomas Moran, Index Peak, Yellowstone National Park, 1914, oil on canvas, 20 x 30 1/4 inches, Private collection)
Moran’s association with the exploration of the American West and the paintings that resulted from his travels created a base of support from well-to-do tourists eager to visit remote regions that he painted. He was popular with developers who planned to build hotels and resorts for travelers on the newly completed railroad lines. He was also admired and encouraged by conservation advocates who wanted to preserve the natural beauty of the West for future generations to appreciate. The interests of all of these groups converged on the desire for a National Park System to sustain a spirit of place unique to America, and Moran’s paintings supplied the visual imagery that helped people agree on where those places should be. By the end of his long career, he was considered an artist who had helped create a national art for America. (left: Thomas Moran, Great Falls of Yellowstone, 1898, oil on canvas, 30 x 25 inches, Private collection)
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Almost everyone who commented pointed out the importance of art as a means to be creative. It is nice ti know proper vocabulary and various artists and art and music periods, especially if you like doing crossword puzzles. I’m not a professional artist in any of the genres, but if had not had the opportunity to explore and try out what talents I may have thought I had, I don’t believe I would have the admiration and the appreciation for those who have chosen a professional field in the creative arts. A bubble test will not accomplish this.
There is one point that you are missing here— as a math educator I can tell you that assessing students in mathematics using a standardized test is just as crazy as using a standardized test in art or music. The minute that assessments are done “by the bubble”, all creativity goes out the window, no matter what the subject happens to be.
Let us be careful what we wish for, please; I think the art bubble test is Pearson’s own straw man argument here. They already have non-bubble-based instruments waiting, ready to answer the dismay Sara Mead is engendering with her silly premises.
Pearson doesn’t care whether they use a bubble test, galvanic skin response, or a portfolio rubric, as long as they have the power to create an assessment data-bank through which they can hold children and teachers accountable to their product lines.
Here’s a new non-bubble data-base product they’ve rolled out this week, already mandated for use on Pennsylvania’s preschoolers. It’s reported by PRWeb under the title, “Pearson’s Observational Assessments for Young Children Approved for Adoption by Pennsylvania Early-Learning Programs.”
“The Work Sampling System allows preschool educators to collect information on children’s work and compare it to grade-specific guidelines. They can identify what children are learning, what they are beginning to master, and what they still need to work on and then use those observations to inform curriculum and instruction planning. The Work Sampling System is a criterion-referenced observational assessment with extensive research supporting reliability and validity.”
I hope you aren’t all now saying, “But wait a minute. How can Pearson create a cradle-to-grave oversight, assessment and tracking system for every child in the nation? They don’t know anything about the child’s social or emotional life.” Because, of course Pearson thinks they do:
“The Ounce Scale provides a structure to help guide learning professionals and parents to observe and assess children’s development in the areas of personal connections, feelings about themselves, relationships with other children, understanding and communicating, exploration and problem-solving, and movement and coordination. With the Ounce Scale, Pennsylvania early-childhood educators and specialists have access to a highly reliable, criterion-referenced measure based on specific developmental standards that meet Early Head Start and federal assessment requirements, with online tools for data collection and reporting.”
Did you know that, “Since the inception of the statewide assessment project, Pearson has partnered with the Pennsylvania Office of Child Development and Early Learning…” to create these data systems? So says Carol Watson, the president of Pearson’s Clinical Assessment business.
So, our question is deeper than the mechanistic one of “How should art be assessed?”
Why should art, or children’s feelings, or anything else, be assessed and tracked in any corporation’s universal, state-sponsored and funded accountability system?? How did a for-profit company get into such a presumptuous position?
“Since the inception of the statewide project…” Hmm. It seems like if we open any office door in any public agency, we find Pearson already partnering with our public servants. It’s unseemly and corrupt.
I forgot to include the URL:
Pearson’s Observational Assessments for Young Children Approved for Adoption by Pennsylvania Early-Learning Programs
Work Sampling System and the Ounce Scale Reviewed by State Office of Child Development and Early Learning
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/6/prweb9576452.htm
As a composer and professor of music teaching at the university level in New York City, I teach graduate students from all over the world drawn to our city for its unsurpassed artistic vitality. I have noticed that very talented, intelligent and well-educated students coming to my classes from countries with test-driven education systems often struggle with musical analysis, for one very simple reason: What I value most highly in my students’ analytical work is the capacity to have an original insight into a piece and to develop it convincingly. In other words, the student’s task is not to master what I think, but to teach me something I didn’t know before.
This is a skill that can be taught – by nurturing and not stifling the natural creativity of children from an early age right through graduate school. It is also a skill that can be unlearned – by being subjected to an educational system that devalues originality and glorifies the mastery of received wisdom.
Creativity without knowledge is as worthless as rote learning. What’s needed is a balance. Our national drive towards testing-based curricula in all subjects is taking education in exactly the wrong direction, towards conformity and away from innovation. I leave it to students of mass delusion to explain why we are doing this in the name of enhancing the competitiveness of our nation’s children in job markets of the future that we believe will demand high levels of flexibility and creative thinking. The major effect of the ever-increasing tendency to gear all learning towards standardized tests will be to undermine our children’s mastery of critical and creative thinking and diminish their prospects for employment — and the enjoyment of life.
While multiple choice testing is not the ideal format for any subject, it is often a pragmatic response to the situation. With 20 years of experience behind me, I am a firm advocate for art education, though I feel strongly that art classes at levels need assessment. To teach and assess only cultural literacy would create a weak arts experience, so too would teaching only, concepts, production, and creativity. I believe that a high quality art program weaves together cultural literacy with concepts, production, and creativity. To do less would be to short change students. There are many forms of assessment, with a overall multiple choice only one tool. And, just because a trust would have multiple choice answers does not exclude visuals. For an art class which teaches children to think visually, the questions can have pictures connected to them. The questions can use specific works of art and ask about the art concepts present. Questions could ask about techniques employed in the art room, and again have pictures. Assessment in art class is becoming more of a reality, and we as teachers need to be forerunners and find creative solutions.
Wow, what a great blog & comments. I read this passage & comments and only think that I will home school my children (6yr & 2 months) before I would ever subject them to this reform debauchery.
” When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with
much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. “
That may be the point of the reforms–to drive parents away from public schools, by cutting the budget and strangling them with regulations
Sounds eerily like what they are attempting to do with teachers & other staff. Although I should refrain from using the word “reform” since it tacitly implies improvement when it really is “data-driven” or “misinformed reform”
And without sounding too coarse, it must really suck to be a student in these schools that systematically suck the life out of any enjoyable & creative moments. How much water can a vessel hold? Students need a break in their schedules to refresh,recharge their batteries. constant pressure & hypervigilance will lead to burnout or a crash, thats why we numb ourselves with mindless drivel like millionaire matchmaker & swamp people. I believe that this relentless pressure on students will initially raise scores but then fall drastically as they become apathetic, but ironically that might inspire them to express themselves artistically.