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Fall 2000 * Volume
3 * Number 1 SOME THOUGHTS ON MUSIC DEPARTMENT ASSESSMENT By Dr. Huw Lewis Any department whose curriculum involves the teaching of both 'theoretical' and 'practical' elements of a discipline finds itself using a wide variety of pedagogical methods. This necessity for variety in methodology in turn suggests (demands?) an equally diverse array of tools for assessment. The Music Department's teaching activities run the gamut from solo and ensemble performance through composition and analytic theory to musicology. As a result, we've developed an assessment program that, in order to drive student learning effectively, is naturally very rich and diverse in its totality. Simply put, we don't use the same measurements to evaluate a student's free and original musical composition as we do to evaluate her fugue composed with eighteenth-century manners, even though both are relatively similar activities. An altogether different set of measurements is used to judge a paper dealing with nineteenth-century opera, and yet again quite another distinct set of criteria is used to evaluate musical performance. WRITING ASSESSMENT AT HOPE COLLEGE By Dr. Richard Ray Last year the Assessment Committee initiated an effort to collect direct measures of student abilities for two of the most critical aspects of our general education program: writing and quantitative literacy. Although the data for the quantitative literacy pilot project will not be available until Christmas, the results of the first round of writing assessment have been analyzed and are presented here for your information. Keep in mind that these data are based on only 86 papers from senior seminar students in a single semester. Before drawing firm conclusions about our students' writing, we will have to collect more data over a longer period. CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTS AAHE Assessment Conference: June 23-26, 2001 ACT/NCTLA Assessment Institutes: February 15-17, 2001 March 29-31, 2001 Faculty members interested in attending one of these conferences are encouraged to contact Jon Huisken to request funding. |
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