The Benchmark Music Assessments of 2nd and 5th graders in the Portuguese context

Description

In 2017, for the first time in the Portuguese educational system, a 90-minute benchmark assessment was implemented for 2nd graders in the Arts domain (Music, Drama, Visual Arts, and Dance) by the organization responsible for external evaluation in Portugal (Institute for Educational Assessment—IAVE). In 2018, it also followed, for the first time, an assessment for 5th graders in Music Education alternating yearly with Visual and Technological Education and Physical Education. Due to the pandemic, the music assessment did not take place again until 2024. In the Portuguese education system, the 2nd and 5th grades correspond to the middle of the cycles, where the first cycle ranges from first to fourth grades and the second cycle from fifth to sixth grades.
This assessment practice paper intends to discuss the implementation of those benchmark assessments. As a first approach, extending them to artistic areas—until 2016, only Portuguese and Math were assessed in both second cycles—drew attention to teachers and society, underlining that these curricular areas not only exist but can be important for the overall development of students. However, the instrumental/political use of these assessments is not enough. What is being assessed and how? For example, the assessment for 5th graders in 2018 intended to evaluate: (i) the individual performance in instrumental interpretation; (ii) the individual composition of a 4-bar melody and its instrumental interpretation with a recorded accompaniment, and (iii) the ability to analyze a composition (melody) by a colleague, using appropriate vocabulary on the duration of the melody/number of bars, repetition, pulse, musical phrases (IAVE, 2024). Tasks (i) and (ii) included preparation time corresponding to 40 minutes in the audio-test recording, and the 50 minutes left were for students' individual musical performances and grading by the teachers of classes of up to 30 students. A few considerations arise: (1) the Music Education Program had an open conception (MEa, MEb), leading to many methodological options and different ways of managing the curriculum; (2) therefore, all over the country students could be at very different stages of their musical development in the different musical domains; (3) in first cycle, the generalist teacher has the responsibility to develop all artistic areas of the curriculum, and in most cases, they do not feel confident or prepared to do so regarding music; most private schools have music specialists for these grades; in public schools, there are two situations: music specialists support the generalist teacher in musical activities (very rare to find), and music is taught outside the school timetable, and is not mandatory (aka curricular enrichment activities); thus, no account is taken of the students’ musical journey before getting to the assessment (Fautley, 2010, p. 32); (4) in most cases, fifth grade corresponds to the first school year taught by a music specialist, once or twice a week, for 90 or 45 minutes, respectively; (5) the assessment involved reading and writing notation, which may have disadvantaged students whose teaching and learning processes had been based on informal practices until then, since it is not a mandatory skill; (6) all activities were based on unfamiliar musical material; (7) three versions of the test were administered, hence student's level of musical performance could have varied according to differences in the musical material; (8) students had to play and sing individually before the colleagues, familiar and unfamiliar teachers; (9) in Task (i), for example, grading teachers had nine performance descriptors to use on site for each student, becoming a demanding and exhausting task.
We recognize that the guiding principles of external assessment, as stated by law (DL 17/2016), are most valuable since they emphasize the need to monitor the development of the curriculum, provide detailed information to schools, teachers, carers, and students, and promote pedagogical intervention aimed at each student's difficulties. As Lovins (2009) states, “high-quality assessment that informs both classroom practice and educational policy is critical” (p. 37). Given that there was no history of external assessment in music education, designing assessment instruments should have required (and still does) a broad reflection involving the government, higher education institutions, and the Portuguese Association for Music Education (APEM), representing the teachers’ community. Several questions remain upstream to be answered: In what ways is the curriculum being approached? What type of assessments are being used? To what degree are curriculum and assessments linked? How does the multicultural classroom affect the approaches to curriculum and assessment? Perhaps, benchmarking assessments should be based on the system's formative supervision to improve teaching practices, which can contribute to improving children's learning.

Period	21 Mar 2025
Event title	The 10th International Symposium on Assessment in Music Education: Assessment in Music Education: Curricular Connections
Event type	Conference
Conference number	10
Location	Olathe - Kansas, United States, KansasShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International