The Arts in Schools - Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

can be directly quantified and these are mainly withinthe instructional realm — information retention, certainsorts of skill and so on. Since these make up only asmall part of education, they should not impose assessmentpatterns on the greater part.b Evaluation and assessment involve personal judgementsby teachers and examiners and have much to do withvalues, feelings and intuition. Most assessments are notclinically objective, nor can they be. Nor are they mademore reliable, objective or sensitive by condensing theminto a single letter or number. Doing so can give amisleading impression of finality.e We see the purpose of education, and therefore ofevaluation and assessment, as helping children to reachthe highest level of attainment of which they are capable.Grading encourages generalised comparisonsbetween children — '15th in the class' — which may notbe helpful, appropriate or reliable.d Grades always act like averages, and in doing so smoothout individual characteristics and variations amongchildren. A piece of work which has both first-classand very poor features may be graded neither A nor Fbut be given a C. Another essay may show consistentqualities throughout and also be given a C. The markitself provides no information on the important ways inwhich the works differ. Moreover, unless the grade isaccompanied by some verbal comment, the pupilsthemselves receive no benefit from the assessment apartfrom some implied sense of rank in the group's overallperformance. Because of the form they take, suchassessments can obscure information which may be ofconsiderable interest and importance. In such circumstancesthe pupil can be asked 'What did you get out ofthis course?' and reply in all seriousness, 'I got a B'(Rowntree, 1977). Such devices work against thepurpose they are meant to serve. They do not conveyadequate information, and the amount they do conveyis, in these ways, often misleading.138 Impli- We are calling for forms of evaluation and assessment whichcations for are compatible with the different forms of work which goaccount- on in schools. We talked in Chapter 1 of the different formsability of human rationality. Too often these differences are disregardedin schools at the vital stage of evaluation andassessment where it is assumed that all forms of attainmentcan be quantified. There are three points here. First, we areconcerned in the arts, not so much with the quantity, aswith the quality of the experience. When in the adult world85