(Re)Interpreting Assessment in Out-of-School-Time Youth Arts Programming

• In Event: Out-of-School-Time Youth Arts Programs: What Are the Big Juicy Questions?

Abstract

Purpose
Assessment in OST youth arts programming is ill-defined and perplexing, though it continues to be high-stakes as funders increasingly require evidence of programmatic success (Brown, 2016). Despite the perceived unnatural fit between the arts and assessment, scholars are attempting to redefine and reframe assessment in and for arts learning on its own terms (Halverson, in press). The purpose of this study is to reframe assessment in OST youth arts programming by investigating how the phenomenon of assessment is understood and enacted by arts leaders across the country.

Theoretical Perspective
Educational assessment in the United States has predominantly evaluated the acquisition metaphor for learning, which conceives of learning as the accumulation and refinement of “basic units of knowledge” (Sfard, 1998, p. 5). Emphasis on developing standardized, “unbiased” tests that efficiently capture, measure, rank, and predict student achievement (Haney, 1981; Frederiksen, 1984; Moncaleano & Russell, 2018) illustrates how assessment frames learning as an almost tangible object, which can be acquired by students or separated from them for “objective” comparison. However, in OST arts education, acquisition of knowledge or skills is often a means to a much more unpredictable and subjective end. Without adequate research on assessment approaches specifically in and for OST arts education, such learning spaces are pushed to conform to acquisition metaphors of learning and assessment (Brown, 2016; Omasta et al., 2020) or risk being underfunded.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
The data was analyzed through a phenomenological lens in an effort to (a) understand how arts leaders make meaning of assessment, and (b) to reinterpret the purpose and practices of assessment in OST youth arts based on their meaning making (Crotty, 1998). The transcripts of interviews and focus groups were analyzed through cycles of structural and pattern coding (Saldaña, 2016) using data analysis matrices and memos (Maxwell, 2013) to answer the following research questions:
(1) What do arts leaders assess and how?
(2) How do arts leaders perceive the purpose and utility of assessment?
(4) What values for learning and success are reflected in discussions about assessment?

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Data sources include all twelve interviews and thirteen focus groups with leaders, founders, teaching artists, funders, and policy makers of youth arts organizations from across the country.

Results
Current findings identify assessment tools arts leaders use (e.g. variations on critique), and indicators of success they want to assess for (e.g. transferable skill development). Additionally, leaders demonstrate three approaches to assessment: (1) utilizing traditional assessments; (2) working outside assessment traditions; (3) rejecting traditional conceptions of assessment as inauthentic measures of learning. Lastly, researchers identify values for learning that leaders name and call on future research to develop tools that can attend to these less easily measured outcomes.

Scholarly Significance
By investigating how OST arts leaders make sense of assessment in arts learning, this study presents a broader conception of how assessment can be integrated in the arts and disrupts the assumption that learning can only be assessed if it is acquired.

Authors

• Kailea Saplan, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Katherine Norman, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Caleb Probst, University of Wisconsin - Madison