Educators, administrators and policy-makers from four Massachusetts school districts are currently developing prototypes for ways to measure children's knowledge of and skills in the arts at the elementary school level.
Schools are very hungry for collaboration with other districts.
Pittsfield, Somerville, Weymouth and Worcester school districts were chosen by the MDOE, MAAE and MCC to form teams of arts educators and elementary classroom teachers to develop arts assessment models for their respective communities. Worcester Public Schools is piloting a program which will utilize the technology of digital cameras to create electronic portfolios of students' visual art. One grade or class in a few schools across the district will participate in this new program where students' works on paper will be transmitted digitally onto a computer disk. Mr. Rappaport said this approach allows the student self-assessment through comparisons of their current work to previous assignments, while still providing teachers with a vehicle for local assessment. The creation of these teams has allowed my Worcester colleagues and me to meet weekly to look at tools for assessment and to discuss all of the issues involved.