Policy Power: Teacher Assessment and NAEP Exemplars

• In Event: Discussing Educational Policy and Implications of Efficacy in the Arts as School Subject Areas: NAEP to Teacher-Made Assessment to Subject Area Growth

Abstract

Symposium panelist provides three functions on this panel and for research with NAEP Visual Arts restricted data. First, panelist discusses possible teacher assessments procedures and how teachers could include NAEP testing blocks. Second, panelist discusses rater procedures for the NAEP assessment and implication for results and student learning; and third, serves as an arts education policy interpreter providing discernible and useful information for the improvement of arts education in our nation’s schools.
Teacher made assessment batteries can use NAEP blocks to test general art understandings. The feasibility of using NAEP blocks in conjunction with teacher made assessment was examined under a 2010 National Art Education Foundation Research Grant in which the NAEP Portrait Block was analyzed at the component level and extended to classroom instruction using a range of 20th century examples consistent with the Mother/Child testing block administered in 1997 and 2008. Further grounding for combining general and specific test blocks comes from the researcher’s development, testing, and publication of a “bundled” assessment instrument composed of discrete content, critical writing, and art making tasks.
Raters/rating, training, and adjudication procedures used by NAEP condition interpretation about what information the assessment captured about student learning. The basis for this examination comes from considering designing and refining adjudication procedures that produce consistently high paired inter-judge reliabilities and significantly high percentages of rater agreement for student drawings, ceramic arts and sculpture, and more recently, critical writings.
As discussed by Diket and Brewer (2011), not only have the findings from the NAEP been very controversial, the methods and rationales have also been brought into question by both art and music educators. Panelist 2 asks “why” the 1997 and 2008 assessment that randomly sampled several thousand eight-grade students has largely been ignored by the field. The possible reasons for that phenomenon are complex, but panelist concludes that any national, state, or local attempts at creating research agendas and arts assessment would be horribly remiss without taking into consideration the lessons learned from these large, national studies. Here is where the significance of the secondary analysis of the 1997 restricted arts data and the ongoing second secondary analysis of the 2008 come into play. This second, more in-depth analysis of comparative demographics, student responses, and art produces provides a deeper and richer understanding about what student may know about visual art and some of the relationships and correlations with demographics unexplored by Consortium members in their study of NAEP 1997. It is this panelist’s role to make the new findings from this very complicated analysis understandable, instructional, foundational, and usable for arts education policy makers and advocates, associations and partnerships, and for pre K-postgraduate public and private schools and beyond (SECAC, 2010).

Author

• Thomas Brewer, University of Central Florida