Day 4 - A Side Road off of the Side Road Combined with a Return to the Starting Line

EDUC 5410

            After reading a handout David gave us on Friday that demonstrated the Assessment as Research process on Sunday afternoon, I realized that tackling an assessment issue in faith-based schooling would perhaps be too monumental a task for this particular exercise and time frame.  As a result, I pulled out a pen and paper and began planning for a different topic to address that had much more current real life application when the school year begins again: how to get students to effectively practice for band.  While this change has set me slightly behind (Saturday was used to find all sorts of articles surrounding faith-based learning that will now perhaps be useful for my future thesis), I feel much more confident in what I am doing and how it will help my students come the fall.

            Included below is a rationale that I wrote up last night for this topic, as well as my defining purpose questions.

Rationale

            As long as I have been teaching music I have often struggled with finding ways to inspire students to practice outside of class.  Like most band teachers, at one point practicing at home, recording these minutes, having a parent sign it, and turning it in each Thursday constituted twenty percent of their grade each reporting period.  The argument nearly every band educator I knew had for this practice was simply that it was the only way to get most of them to do at least some practice.  During a professional development session for Fine Arts and Physical Education four years ago, we were challenged to discuss ways to rid our assessment practices of anything that was not authentic. 

            It was at this session that it dawned on me that what I was assessing was not how much students were practicing or the quality of the practice, but rather on how organized they were to hand in a sheet of paper with, too often, inflated minutes to keep their grades up.  Though I didn’t know it at the time, my colleagues and I were placing a tremendous amount of grade weight on an assignment made up completely of construct irrelevant variance.  I began paying much closer attention to the grades students were “earning” and I noticed a pattern: some of my best musicians, who often scored tremendously high on performance tests and music theory assignments, were scoring in the mid to high seventy percent range in band class.  Other students, who were either not improving or completely stalled in their musical development, were scoring in the high eighties to low nineties even though they did mediocre on the same performance tests.  Though it sounds strange, it never dawned on me in the first ten years of my teaching career that the grades were askew simply due to the fact that fully twenty percent of the band grade was based not upon a students’ technical and musical ability but rather upon their organizational skills and honest or lack thereof. 

            While I now only take in weekly practice minute journals as formative assessment with no weight on the grade, I have noticed particularly in this past school year that I am experiencing far too many students not giving me any evidence of practice outside of school save in the results on their performance tests.  I realize that I need to find a way to make practicing outside of class more meaningful to students and, hopefully along with this, increase the overall performance of the ensembles.

            Below are current (but always changeable) examples of the new direction I am taking in regards to defining the areas of Purpose and Assessment Design.

Defining Purpose

Q 1 and 2: What information needs do I want to know about regarding my band students practice habits?

            The information I am hoping to gain from this assessment model will be achieved through the following questions: How are students’ practice habits effectively developing their instrumental technical ability?  Regardless of the quantitative amount, how qualitative are students’ practice sessions?  Do students practice with a focus upon developing their areas of weakness or simply reinforcing what they already do well?  

Defining Assessment Design

1.     What are the constructs you will be measuring with this assessment?

The constructs I will be assessing are specifically technical ability of four specific aspects of instrumental performance including:

1      Metacognition? What are they learning about practicing and about themselves?

2      Kinesthetic/Psychomotor exercise? 

a.    Tone production

b.    Pitch accuracy

c.     Rhythmic accuracy

d.    Articulation

3      Affective domain? Are they more satisfied with their development in band and more eager to continue as a result of increased ability?

EDUC 5400

            What an absolutely fascinating conversation in the last hour of class today!  Various points of view of what research is were diverse and, I believe, presented with heartfelt passion.

            Perhaps I am wrong but I got the sense at times that some among us do not yet recognize that research is personal, grounded often in what has and continues to shape an individual.  Research can spring from a personal passion, particularly in regards to the plight of a group of people or those near to us.  Research can be altruistic and for the common good or for small groups who will benefit.  I believe that when choosing a research topic, one can never look at how small or large the target audience is.  What may begin as a potential benefit for a small focus group may become something much larger and in the end improve the plight of many. 

            I have a friend who did his Master and PhD. work in the area of medical research.  In a conversation twelve years ago, while watching him split chromosomes in his lab at NYU, I asked him what his research focuses would be throughout his career.  I listed off the hot button issues of the day where lots of research dollars were available and his answer surprised me.  He didn’t need the glory of finding a cure for AIDS (his example) but that his passion lay in researching genetic diseases which people had no knowledge they were going to get (at the time) or could do anything to stop them. 

            I remembered that conversation today during our class discussion.  I believe that research is, at its fundamental level, personal.  How many people read it, accept it, or discard it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that it is of tremendous quality so that it helps the people it intends to.