Assessment is an important activity which teachers and schools put a lot of time and effort into thinking about. This is also true for progression. There can seem to be quite a straightforward connection between assessment and progression; but in this article we want to try to problematise some of the thinking that lies behind what may seem to be, on the surface, a fairly simple set of ideas.
Washback
One of the first concepts that we want to think about is the idea of ‘washback’. This is where testing has an effect on curriculum. Clearly at KS4 and KS5 levels this is going to be the whole purpose of the teaching and learning programme; but when we think of teaching at KS3, we can also see how the impact of examination curriculums has a significant influence on the learning programme at this stage. This can create something of a dilemma for the classroom teacher, however. Although clearly we all want our pupils to do well in public examination at the age of 16, we also know that only about 7% of pupils nationally are taking up music at age 14+. The washback effect means that a course of teaching and learning which should be designed for everyone is in danger of only being of use to the 7% who will take it later. Indeed, some teachers report that working in this way actually reduces uptake at option level, as it has been too focused on this small group of learners.
In order to counter the washback effect, we might need to consider designing curriculums forwards from where the learners are now, rather than backwards from where we want a tiny minority to be in a few years' time. Thinking about how we want young people to develop as musicians, rather than what a grade 9 involves at GCSE, can be helpful as we look at the purposes and values we place on assessment in our day-to-day music teacher practices.
Progression
This brings us to the issue of progression. Assessment is often pressed into use for schools and teachers to evidence that learners are moving towards the goal of examination success some years down the line – something that is often conceptualised as ‘school assessment data’. What this means in practice is that pupil progression is required to show a linear upwards trajectory. Some schools employ the notion of ‘flightpaths’, which show the various linear progression routes in terms of pupils' grades which can be expected, and teachers are expected to account for their pupils making this linear progress.
One of the big problems for classroom music education is that the National Curriculum for music, and the very nature of the subject itself, is not amenable to this sort of linearity of attainment being charted. The three ‘pillars’ of the NC – composing, performing, listening – are not linked in ways which make progression in one domain automatically transferable to another. Different music curriculums in different schools will also operate differently, as music teachers design these to meet the particular needs of their pupils. To take a simplistic example, a classroom unit of work focusing on composing a soundscape could be followed by one on the Viennese waltz, and then by one on singing worksongs. While all of these are perfectly reasonable endeavours in their own right, the spillover of learning outcomes from one to another does not automatically lead to similar attainment and progression values being achieved. Charting the attainment of a pupil across these three units is likely to show what might be termed an uneven profile. For schools that want a linearity of flightpath-type attainment being demonstrated, this creates problems.
Unpicking terminologies
Already at this stage in this article a number of complex terminologies have been employed, and have been treated as though they are universally understood by teachers. But are they? Let us take a few of these words, and ask you to spend a moment reflecting. What do you understand each of these words to mean:
- assessment?
- attainment?
- progression?
Let us take a moment to dissect these. Assessment is so widely used that you may feel insulted that you have been asked to do this; but how do you differentiate between formative and summative assessment? We know that music teachers are really good at formative assessment; indeed, it was the renowned music educator Keith Swanwick who observed that ‘to teach is to assess’ (Music, Mind, and Education, 1988, p. 149; London: Routledge), for example. But is your SLT happy if they ask you about your assessments and you say, ‘Oh, it's formative assessment, we do that all the time in music, but there are no grades involved’! Would they be happy with that answer and leave you alone? Often, as in this case, assessment is taken to mean summative assessment, and you will be expected to provide grades, or assessment ‘data’ that supports your evaluative statements.
Attainment
So, what about Attainment? Attainment is usually taken to mean a measurement of how well a pupil can do something, and normally takes the form of a grade, mark, or level. This can be as the result of a test, or could be awarded by the teacher. The notion of progression relates to the accumulation of attainment grades, and is often linked to a concern with the speed with which such grades are acquired; hence ‘rapid progress’ means a quick trajectory through the pathway, whereas ‘slow progress’ means quite the opposite.
Back to the future
This slight diversion through the dictionary of assessment terminologies should hopefully be enough to show that although these terms are in daily use in schools, the concepts that lie behind them are nonetheless complex, and not at all straightforward as far as classroom music is concerned. So why are they invoked in this discussion of classroom assessment? The answer is to be found in the ways in which schools – or to be precise, some schools – require their music teachers to measure, chart and report on attainment and progress – a point to which we now turn.
We saw at the outset that washback occurs when testing influences what will be taught and learned. In some schools – again important to say some – there is also what could be thought of as ‘assessment grading washback’. This is where subjects are required to use GCSE grades throughout the lower secondary school to show progress towards the examination; in other words, to try to predict future attainment in a specific examination using grades and criteria which, as we saw, the majority of pupils will not take.
This can be rather a difficult dynamic for music teachers to handle, as musical learning is often somewhat interconnected. Pupils in KS3 classes listen as they improvise and may also perform what they compose. This makes it tricky to disentangle, and applying GCSE gradings to a context for which they were not intended can make assessment unreliable. These aspects have implications for curriculum design too. We know that music teachers are highly skilled in developing curriculums for their classes and are experts in this field. Identifying young people's musical gaps in knowledge, providing opportunities for them to engage through existing musical know-how, and using their wide variety of musical experiences to build a curriculum is highly complex. Opening the gates to assessment washback brings with it a real danger of distorting or disrupting music teachers' planning processes, especially when this is an unrecognised event. This can lead to classroom musical activities which do not fit the purpose or the context for which they were originally conceived. What GCSE grading should be applied to a Logic track which contains pupil improvisation and library loops and on which a group of five Year 9s have worked? If we cannot separate these strands, does this mean their music has limited musical value? Curriculum and assessment can be complex to navigate as they bump into each other in the KS3 music classroom in this way.
This does not mean that teachers should throw up their hands and think it's all too much! Careful thinking, maybe with colleagues, can be very helpful in finding a safe pathway through this rather dangerous forest. And, of course, the pages of Music Teacher magazine are a useful source of help and inspiration too!
