Abstract

In this session, Professor Martin Fautley will describe a number of issues with assessment practices in education drawing on his research in secondary schools. He will describe the ways in which the original purposes of formative and summative assessment have become misunderstood by school assessment managers, and how the emphasis on data collection has, in many cases, hindered the development in school music lessons of appropriate music-learning and music-making activities during Key Stage 3. He describes how music teachers, who were once perceived to be in the vanguard of appropriate formative assessment practice, have had to change their assessment practices to meet the requirements of a system in which they have little personal investment, and how the results from these assessments are subject to intervention by school management teams.