Authentic Secondary Art Assessment: Snapshots from Art Teacher Practice

Offering a contemporary overview of how visual art teachers assess learning in their classrooms, this book provides an outline of the role of assessment in reporting not only student achievement but also how student assessment ties to the intrinsic and external assessments of teacher performance. Compiled using stories from the classrooms of 19 visual art high school teachers who share their approaches to benchmarking student success, the text encourages teachers to consider assessment both for guiding their students to achieve artistic goals and for re-envisioning their own curriculum and instruction. The featured assessment snapshots fall along four strands: Visual Narratives and Visual Literacy; Capturing Empathic Understandings and Social Engagement; Measuring Risk-taking and Ingenuity; and Assessing Collaborative and Integrated Learning Outcomes. Across these sections, teacher contributors offer different perspectives for student assessment, capturing a snapshot of the work of skilled practitioners and focusing on various aspects of what can be evidenced and analyzed through formative and summative evaluation. The voices of university level art educators are also included to expand the range of context from curriculum and instruction content that is covered in pre-service art methods courses. All sections also conclude with a summary, questions, and discussion points. Including diverse teacher voices as well as presenting assessment perspectives with an eye to the National Core Art Standards (NCAS), this book is ideal for pre-service and in-service secondary art educators, as well as for use in art education teacher certification courses that focus on secondary methods, and art education graduate classes in assessment.