My lesson was based off of the Arizona Arts Standards for General Music for Fourth Grade students (AZ Standards, 2015). The goal is for students to perform on the recorder a prepared song which will be assessed from a performance rubric. The objectives to the goals were assessed with online formative assessment tools from plickers.com and formative.com (McKinley, 2015).
I observed in my pre-test of students, approximately 63% of students skills tested pass the basic skills needed to perform on performance songs (chart 1). In regards to showing mastery of the music symbols that are used in performance, I noted that 50% of the random sampling of fourth grade students showed mastery on one assessment (Formative.com) and a majority of students scoring proficient on recorder and music symbol basics (chart 1) with the exception of one class, who were English Language Learners (plickers.com). The reason behind the disparity in results can be attributed to the vocabulary used and the type of text used in context with the students. More importantly, the timing of the assessment also contributed to the results because one group (regular ed. classroom) had more time to complete the online testing than the ELL group. I forecast positive gains when the post test is administered with the fourth grade students next month and I expect all groups and subgroups to show proficiency with practice is honored by all members.
The use of technology in these assessment showed great promise and some challenges to me as an educator integrating technology in performance based content area. One major positive remark was how easy it was to set up some of the online components. With formantive.com and plickers.com setting up the classroom was as easy as importing class list through a .csv file or copy/paste functions. Adding assessment questions were of ease for both tools and getting results after the assessment was given was easy to retrieve. I was also able to give specific feedback to students that they can view outside of class from formative.com, which was a huge bonus for me as a teacher. I believe this will have a positive effect on students since they rarely receive any type of feedback during or after an assessment. Some negatives of online assessment is the limitation each tool presented and the time it took to administer to multiple groups of students with limited equipment for students to participate. The student’s reaction time to log-in to the computer, then log-in to the tools was slowing the students and frustrating a few. Also with the class only scheduled for thirty minutes, any delays such as passing out materials or equipment cuts assessment time considerably. Students in both online tools demonstrated high motivation to complete the assessment and I could see that up to 10 question was the absolute maximum for the assessment. I found myself noticing that my questions I proposed to the students do need to be given randomly to each student to show a more authentic response and to make the evaluation more reliable.
References
Arizona State Department of Education (2015). Arts standards: General music. Retrieved from http://www.azed.gov/standards-practices/files/2015/05/2015-general-music-standards.pdf
McKinley, Jessie (2015). Assignment #2: Technology-assisted assessment. Retrieved from http://gcu-tec546.blogspot.com/
Pre-test results
Post-test results
Not Available Until January 2016
