Arts and Cultural Education in Iceland : Professor Anne Bamford

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grade, mark and/or comment based on their artistic achievement. Learning portfolios and individual student records were common in quality art programmes. In other instances, reflective processes were less formalised and would use conversations, images and actions to instigate and maintain the reflective processes, as these quotes show: All areas of the arts are assessed. Older pupils get a grade but younger pupils just get a comment. We keep personal records for all students All children get a report for the arts. The oldest classes get a mark and the younger classes get a comment. We tend to try and give more positive comments to the younger pupils. It’s difficult to measure the arts. First to 4 th grade get a comment but all other grades get a mark. There are usually no tests given in arts, but in almost all cases, achievement in the arts subjects is reported on the report card to the parents. This generally takes the form of a comment, but of older children, it can also include grades (e.g. A, B, C) or a mark (numerical). All the children are graded in the arts. The younger pupils get a comment and once the pupils get to grade 5 they get a mark. It is between 1-10. Assessment is a topic under discussion in every school at the moment. We have a teachers meeting about assessment. Six schools all joined together and someone from the University came but they really did not talk about assessing the arts. Other people interviewed felt that while there were assessment processes in place, these lacked the evidence and detail to make informed judgements about a child’s progress in the arts: What is being done in the schools is to a large extend not visible on the grade card. That the child might have been a part of the youth board etc. This is bad because how are the secondary schools profiling the students? Extra curricular activities are not reported enough. Criticism was also made of the lack of assessment guidelines in curriculum documents: The national curriculum mandates an assessment but does not say how. Last year we had a meeting with associations of arts and crafts teachers; they thought that standardised tests might raise the standards. Most of them however were sceptical of testing visual arts. The last of the quotes above refers to the importance of training teachers to adequately assess in the creative and arts areas. Teachers were not always confident in arts assessment, but this was acknowledged in teacher education where a number of methods were being taught to students, as the following examples demonstrate: We introduce the teacher education students to many approaches to assessing in the arts. We notice there is a lack of confidence in drama. Most teachers don’t have the confidence to teach drama. The common response is “I can’t do it” or “I don’t know how”. In music we encourage the student teachers to make learning sequences. They have to develop objectives inline with the syllabus. The national curriculum is quite broad. We ask them to design assessment related to the objectives. We try to teach them that you can assess without a pen and paper test. 80
In visual arts we mainly assess according to a pupils interest and progress. Teachers need to be taught more interesting and creative ways to assess and evaluate. There are new laws for assessment. Hopefully this will make assessment more meaningful. Generally in Iceland, school evaluation is an internal process. The process seems to be detailed and generally rigorous at all levels of schooling and in the afterschool music and arts schools. Parents and children are generally consulted. Interview and survey are the most common methods used in evaluation. Systemic improvements could be made with greater inclusion of peer evaluation (e.g. colleagues from other schools being part of the evaluation team) and by making summaries of the evaluation reports more publicly available. Figure 3.8.1 Has the school been evaluated (Dance schools)? In response to the following question, “Is an official description of the school's internal evaluation publicly accessible?” the results for dance (figure 3.8.2) show that 75% is not available. Figure 3.8.2 Evaluation data is generally not open to the public (Dance schools). Generally, though parents do get the opportuntity to be part of evaluation processes as Figure 3.8.3 shows for dance schools. 81
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Arts and Cultural Education in Icel
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Acknowledgements This research woul
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Helga Rut Guðmundsdóttir Helgi Vi
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5.4.2 Talent developement..........
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practices, but in reality there are
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Chapter 1: Introduction and overvie
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school type to which the comment re
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A future study could examine specif
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The number of pupils with a foreign
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pre-primary school teachers were so
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Figure 1.5.3: How useful is the Nat
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The conclusions from this report in
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primary level exceptional students
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‣ Schools and colleges should be
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Page 89 and 90: demanding more of our schools and t
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Page 107 and 108: Vignette 5.2.4 Our selection proces
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Arts and Cultural Education in Iceland : Professor Anne Bamford

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