Assessment in Music Education: Theory, Practice, and Policy: Selected Papers from the Eighth International Symposium on Assessment in Music Education

By Independent Publishers Group

The Eighth International Symposium on Assessment in Music Education was a virtual event jointly hosted by the University of Florida and the Hochschule fr Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover from May 1424, 2021. The symposium brought together over 100 participants from 17 nations across six continents and 29 U.S. states to learn of each other's work, establish collaborations and professional networks, and shape new directions for research in this important area of music education.The papers published in this volume illustrate current scholarship in the theory, practice, and policy of music education assessment across the world in local, state, and national contexts. In addition, this collection contains a summary of an important international working session focused on developing shared meaning and language to facilitate international discussions of assessment and related topics in music education. As music educators across the world come to terms with increased expectations for accountability of learning in music, the scholars and practitioners who have contributed to this volume provide insight to guide their work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781622776917

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PART 1

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Keynote Address: Musical Judgment as Argumentative Competence: Philosophical reflections on Issues of Assessment in the Arts

Christian Rolle, University of Cologne, Germany

First of all, I would like to thank Tim Brophy, Andreas Lehmann-Wermser and Marshall Haning for inviting me to the conference. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share some ideas on the theoretical basis of the ongoing research project MARKO which is about musical judgment; more precisely, it is about music-related argumentative competence. By the term musical judgment I mean the capacity for judging in issues concerning music. The acronym MARKO stands for Musikbezogene ARgumentationsKOmpetenz. What I am going to present here is philosophical research regarding the question of how to reasonably argue about the quality and qualities of music. The MARKO project also includes empirical research, but here I will only briefly touch on the quantitative study and the development of a test instrument (Ehninger, Knigge, Schurig & Rolle, 2021). Primarily, I will focus on theoretical issues, starting with some thoughts about why the topic—musical judgment—is relevant for music education and issues of assessment. I would then like to address some concerns about music assessment because they shed light on the challenges of how to develop a theory of musical judgment. One of the difficulties is that music is an artistic subject and that many evaluative judgments about music must be understood as aesthetic judgments. Aesthetic judgments are not true or false in the same sense as statements or assertions. I will say something about their specific claim to validity. For the assessment of musical judgment we need a dialectical approach. A solution could be to understand the capacity to judge about music as the ability to provide good reasons for judgments when it comes to a discussion. I will come back to this. However, there is another theoretical problem to be solved. Cultural diversity seems to reduce the prospect of shared judgments about music. These are the points I would like to address in my contribution.

My interest as a researcher in philosophy of music education is to develop a theoretical framework of musical judgment that connects insights provided by aesthetic theory with a transcultural vision of music education by taking sociological factors into account. Such a theoretical framework must consider not only art music but also music in everyday day life, embracing a concept of musicking (Small, 1998) that includes listening to music and talking about music as forms of musical practice. This raises many fundamental questions: How is it possible to discuss musical preferences? How can we gain an understanding of what music means for someone else? Is it possible to teach musical judgment? These questions are difficult to answer not least because musical judgment is thoroughly entangled with issues of taste, cultural practices and values (which means forms of life or Lebensformen as Ludwig Wittgenstein called it).

Why is Musical Judgment Important?

It may be helpful to explain how this topic came to interest me. Let’s go back to the German music scene in the eighties when I was studying classical piano at a school of music, as well as being active as a jazz musician and playing keyboards in rock bands. I was frequently confronted with unfavorable remarks and a dismissive attitude toward what was considered to be mere entertainment. According to many of my teachers, popular music was not taken seriously. This irritated me. I highly appreciated the knowledge of many of the critics who insisted on the superiority of classical music, so I was surprised by their assertions and wondered why they were not able to experience the qualities of popular music. As a young musician and music student, I wanted the music with which I identified to be a serious candidate for aesthetic experience and appreciation. In addition to music education, I was also majoring in philosophy. I admired Theodor Adorno and his approach to critical theory, but I felt miffed by his elitist view of popular music. What I longed for was a philosophical aesthetics that included popular music, but at that time, unfortunately, there were no Simon Frith (1996) or Richard Shusterman (1992) to provide pragmatist aesthetics to support me.

This is how musical judgment became my favorite research topic. It is closely connected to music education, and I suggest that there is a wide consensus that the competence to judge music is a key goal of music education. We not only want our students to perform music well, we also want them to know whether they did. These two quotes from the proceedings of the symposium on assessment in music education in 2007 seem to back my assumption: Douglas Orzolek (2008) wrote that assessment means that the educator (assistant judge) would merely sit next to the learner and offer advice or ideas as they assess themselves, (p. 38) and Jay McPherson (2008) agreed with the view that self-assessment is an important part of the metacognitive approach to instruction (p. 97).

Talking about Music Outside and Inside the Classroom

Argumentation is an integral part of many music practices. In both educational contexts and our everyday lives, we talk about music and we give reasons for our opinions. Consider audience members who, after a concert, might discuss whether they liked what they heard. Think of social media, where comments are posted below music videos that sometimes lead to discussions. People argue about different versions of musical pieces by various interpreters. Music critics and music lovers provide reasons for their opinions when writing or talking about music. Joint music making may reach a point where those involved have to discuss how to proceed.

Why and when, exactly, do students need musical judgment? Randall Allsup and Marsha Baxter (2004) wrote that equipping students with the skills and language to discuss, describe, and defend music […] is an essential aspect of music teaching (p. 1). Indeed, communication about music is essential in everyday classroom practice, and talking about and reflecting upon music is part of the school curriculum in many countries, at least from secondary school up to university level. We need only think, for example, of meaningful music listening, understanding, describing, analyzing, and interpreting music in music appreciation courses. Talking about music can also be part of performance-based music education if the students are—at least to some extent—involved in decision making. Of course, often no discussion takes place because there is someone like a conductor who guides and determines. But in more participatory approaches, the question of how to perform the music or how to arrange it may arise, and with it, the need for negotiations. Even then, admittedly, in many cases no words are needed because participants reach an agreement through musical communication. I will return to this later. However, often (and particularly in education) we expect students to give reasons for their opinions, and doing so is a skill that must be learned. The capacity for musical judgment can be seen as a prerequisite for what has been called critically reflective musicianship by Roger Johnson (2009) or verständige Musikpraxis (reasonable music practices) by the German philosopher of music education, Hermann-Josef Kaiser (2010).

In order to create a promising teaching–learning environment where students have the opportunity to develop their music-related argumentative competence, I suggest an educational process centered on dialectics. My proposition is fundamentally this: Talking about music in the classroom should take place in the form of a controversial discussion based on aesthetic argumentation. I would recommend a teaching method that encourages what could be called an aesthetic dispute in the classroom (Gottschalk & Rolle, 2021; Rolle & Wallbaum, 2011; Rolle, 2014). In other words, I plead for a problem-oriented approach to teaching music, which means that students are asked to jointly examine what is at issue. It is a plea for dialogue.

As announced, I would now like to say a few words about the concerns that exist regarding the measurement of musical judgment.

Skepticism about Measuring Musical Competencies

In 2007, Andreas Lehmann-Wermser organized a small symposium at Bremen University, where an international group of researchers discussed the KoMus project. This project was dedicated to research the Competence to perceive and contextualize Music. The researchers designed a test instrument for assessing the respective competence based on item response theory and developed a competency model. An article about KoMus has been published in the proceedings of the 2009 Symposium on Assessment in Music Education (Jordan & Knigge, 2010).

The project was avant-garde in German research on music education at that time, a pioneer-project, even though modelling competences and developing tests for large scale assessments were significant issues in educational and psychological research. For the first time national standards of education were developed in Germany for the main school subjects, but not for music education, and politicians considered large-scale assessment important for the development of the education system (Lehmann-Wermser, 2019). The conference proceedings published after the Bremen symposium on KoMus were titled Standards and Competency Models for Music Education? (Knigge et al., 2008). Note the question mark; the topic was controversial.

It is not only in German music education that there was and still is a kind of uneasiness regarding aspirations to measure learning outcomes. Educational monitoring programs are suspected of being associated with neoliberal economic discourses and ignoring the meaning of arts and culture for education. There are misgivings about testing as part of what is called audit culture, even though no skeptic would deny the benefits of formative assessment for teaching and learning (Fautley, 2010). I found these concerns discussed in several contributions to proceedings of previous conferences, for example in Richard Colwell’s keynote address from 2007 (Colwell, 2008) and in David Elliot’s keynote from 2009 (Elliot, 2010). Many music educators have serious doubts as to whether music education could benefit from research on a music competency model usable for large-scale assessment. These reservations are based on the strong belief that, if something can be measured, then it cannot be art. Music is an artistic subject; music education aims to enable students to engage in artistic practice and to experience music aesthetically, which is not something that can be measured.

This view can certainly be debated, however: even if aesthetic experience is not measurable, one particular test item of the KoMus competency test aligned with my interest in musical judgment, and we decided to include it into the MARKO test for music-related argumentative competence. It goes like this: The test participants are asked to imagine a rock band contest featuring young amateur musicians. They are also asked to imagine that they are working as student reporters who wants to write an article about the band contest for the school magazine. Participants are instructed to first make as diverse a checklist as possible with keywords for what to pay attention to and then to listen to the audio sample of a rock band performing at the band competition. Their task is as follows: Critically evaluate the band’s performance using the keywords from your checklist!

This shows a promising way to evaluate musical judgment without reducing it to factual knowledge. The goodness of judgment is also not measured by whether it conforms to conventions. What distinguishes good musical judgment from bad one is not a matter of truth, and it would not be appropriate to assess students’ beliefs and preferences. The crucial point is how they justify their opinions. However, we face an unsolved theoretical problem. It is not clear what distinguishes good from bad arguments in discussions about music. Teaching and learning, especially measuring competence in music-related argumentation, require an appropriate theory of aesthetic argumentation.

Claims of Validity

The problem we face when we are trying to develop such a theory of argumentation is well known from the history of aesthetics and the philosophy of art. David Hume (1757) and Immanuel Kant (1790/2007), among others, investigated aesthetic judgments’ specific claims to validity. Aesthetic judgments seem to be less certain than other judgments. It is hard to say how we can decide whether one musical performance of a composition is better than another. It is difficult because aesthetic values are involved and aesthetic values, according to Hume and Kant, cannot be understood as qualities of an object. However, it is not necessary to conclude from this that such judgmental utterances are merely subjective. To understand why people do argue about music, we could conceive aesthetic values as relational; that is to say: they describe a relation between the person who judges and the object (but that is not merely a personal matter).

Those listening to a recording together and arguing about whether the piano accompaniment is played on a real grand piano or a digital piano are not engaging in aesthetic argumentation because the answer is yes or no. But someone who tries to make others aware of the merits of the differentiated sound composition in a piece of music that is the result of the mechanics, strings, and soundboard of the natural instrument has entered the language game of aesthetic argumentation.

Let’s imagine that in a queue at the bar during the break of a classical concert, someone says to the person standing next to her, I didn’t like the second movement. It was too fast. The character of the music was lost. The lines of the melody should be played far more lyrically. She starts to sing, demonstrating what she was missing. What is this concertgoer doing? She is judging the performance of the orchestra, claiming that the musicians have not explored the music thoroughly. But she does not complain about technical deficiencies, nor about intonation; there were no wrong notes, and the musicians played their rhythms precisely. That’s not the point. On such matters, the two concertgoers would presumably agree quickly.

What the point is becomes clear when her conversation partner replies. But it was delightful, the tempo. Not as slow as molasses—like it is unfortunately performed in many cases. Tonight, you could hear the ‘bap, baba, bah’! The lines of the melody you talked about were present. But swinging. I liked it. Obviously, the dispute is not about facts, but about what we perceive and how we perceive it, and about what we appreciate when we listen to music. For such a topic, personal experiences and expectations play an important role. Nevertheless, both parties of the dispute give reasons for their views and try to convince each other. They are involved in a critical discussion about the right musical interpretation (Krausz, 1993). We may assume that they do not think their difference of opinion is only a question of personal taste, such as the decision they have to make at the bar: Do you prefer a beer or a glass of red wine?

Of course, statements such as This piano piece is beautiful sometimes represent only personal taste or are avowals of an emotional state (I feel touched). But in many cases, such judgments have a more universal claim to validity. In these cases, someone who praises a music recording not only describes the effect the music had on her, but also assumes that others will be similarly touched by this performance. She is convinced that the piece is valuable not only for her (we would believe this without any reason), but rather that it is a promising candidate to be valued highly by others as well.

Aesthetic judgements have a specific claim to validity. According to Immanuel Kant (1790/2007, § 19), they can only request acceptance. As he noted in his Critique of Judgment, anyone "who describes anything as beautiful claims that everyone ought to give his approval to the object in question. It could therefore be concluded that aesthetic judgments should be considered recommendations, which only acquire validity when others take the reasons offered as instructions for their own perception of the music. Talking about popular culture, Simon Frith (1998) wrote: Pop judgement is a double process: our critical task […] is first to get people to listen to the right things […], and only then to persuade them to like them. […] Popular cultural arguments, in other words, are not about likes and dislikes as such, but about ways of listening, about ways of hearing, about ways of being" (p. 8).

Andrew McGonigal (2018) provided an overview of different concepts of aesthetic reasons in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. One widely shared characteristic is that their authority is seen as modest compared to other kinds of reasons, even moral reasons. Simon Blackburn (2017), a British philosopher who wrote several books about theories of truth including chapters on the truths of taste, wrote, Rather than argue someone into agreement, we hope to use persuasion, put things in different lights, […] or to excite their imagination. He adds, It is not a matter of syllogism and proofs, but of leading another to assimilate whatever response we find appropriate (pp. 76–77). In a way, it’s a process of education and learning, he claims.

Aesthetic reasons are never compelling; they, so to say, campaign for a perspective. Aesthetic arguments recommend points of view. They encourage others to listen to the music in a certain way. But that means that the validity of aesthetic judgments can only be explained as part of a theory of their communicative justification. Reasons given remain fruitless if those involved fail to develop an interest in how the others hear and understand the music. Only if the opponents make an effort to understand the significance of the music for the others, it can turn out to be attractive, interesting, perhaps beautiful for themselves. What they need is the ability to take other perspectives, at least to some extent.

This does not guarantee that a consensus is reached at the end of the discussion. But even if the aesthetic argumentation finally leads to the insight that our tastes are simply different, we may well have discovered what others like about this music, this arrangement, or this particular recording. There might remain a reasonable disagreement. Sometimes, usually over a long period of time, we may succeed in convincing others of the merits of the music that we are enthusiastic about so that they also come to love it.

Why Cultural Diversity Challenges a Theory of Aesthetic Argumentation

This may not be problematic as long as we are operating within a common music culture. However, if we are interested in sharing music across cultural boundaries, questions arise about how to collaborate and how to communicate. In this case, mutual understanding may require some kind of cultural translation. This challenges the idea of how we can come to a shared view by argumentation. Some music practices are closely connected to moral values and religious beliefs. Music is often seen as expressing cultural identity. Under such circumstances it may be more difficult to agree.

The members of a string quartet have to come to an agreement about a shared tempo and dynamics while performing. In such cases, there are some common criteria for judgment within a certain cultural practice. However, sometimes the reasons given for musical judgments can only be convincing if they take cultural differences into consideration. Sometimes, we cannot rely on shared criteria. It makes no sense to judge a Brazilian samba recording with the same standards we apply when we listen to a violin concerto written by Johann Sebastian Bach or an opera written by Luigi Nono. Sometimes, the criteria we have at hand to justify our evaluation may lack reliability, and we do not share the same values. If so, and if we are really interested in the dialogue, we must collaboratively find or develop new criteria for this one case.

What does this mean for assessing musical judgment based on the theory of aesthetic argumentation? Do cultural diversity and multiculturalism limit the scope of reasonable communication? Such a skeptical position has been disputed with respect to moral issues, for example by Harvey Siegel (1999) insisting on the transcultural normative reach of arguments. But what about music related discussions? Do we have to accept that aesthetic argumentation is a game that can only be played by members of a specific music culture (e.g., by those who are familiar with the tradition of Western classical music)? Does a dialogical approach to music aesthetics reach its limits here?

My answer would be that dialogue and argumentation may allow us to move from our culture-bound perspective to new perspectives on music. It allows for transformation. Dialogue and argumentation can help change our musical knowledge, how we listen to music, what we hear, and how we judge music. If this were not so, we would be lost in view of cultural changes. There are no clear, fixed, and eternal boundaries between different musical genres and their norms and conventions. Music cultures are in flux.

MARKO: A Model of Music-related Argumentative Competence

Based on the considerations above it is possible to understand musical judgment as music-related argumentative competence and to develop a competency model. Such a model must link theoretical assumptions on aesthetic argumentation to general argumentation theories. To understand musical judgment, we need a dialectical approach to argumentation theory. Van Eemeren and others defined argumentation as a communicative and interactional act complex aimed at resolving a difference of opinion with the addressee by putting forward a constellation of propositions the arguer can be held accountable for to make the standpoint at issue acceptable to a rational judge who judges reasonably (Van Eemeren et al., 2014, p. 7; see similarly Wohlrapp, 2014).

The theoretical work model of music-related argumentative competence I proposed (Rolle, 2013) distinguishes seven hierarchical levels. The stages reflect research on the reflective judgment model (King & Kitchener, 2002), and the developmental model of understanding art published by Parsons (1987). While people at lower levels refer only to the properties of the music, such as its musical attributes or expressive qualities, people at higher levels combine the former two aspects and are able to consider different aesthetic conventions or cultural practices. Higher music-related argumentative competence coincides with describing the aesthetic object in a more differentiated way and mentioning more different elements. People at lower levels assume that different musical judgments are a matter of taste, whereas people at higher levels can reflect on their own musical preferences and integrate different perspectives and counterarguments into their reasoning. Presumably, the highest level is only reached by music experts, academics, musicologists, music students and professional musicians (Knörzer et al.,