Assessment of performing arts students’ productions: A critical review of an assessment model

The education enterprise is fraught with diverse strategies for assessing learning outcomes. The diversity manifests attempts to confront the challenges that impede the achievement of objectivity, which is required to enhance the efficacy of evaluating students’ learning outcomes. This struggle becomes pronounced as educators engage in the assessment of “practical” performance of art forms that demand a lot of effort to uphold objectivity and meliorate problems relating to reliability and validity that characterize subjective observations made by assessors. This study examined assessment strategies adopted by a department of performing arts with the view to increasing the degree of objectivity associated with the assessment of performing arts “practical” examination. For the study, data was collected from three judges during the end of semester examinations for the courses Ghanaian traditional dance, Dance Techniques and Introduction to Dance Cultures of the World in the 2015/2016 academic year. The results indicated that there was significant difference with an α = 0.05, F(2, 85) = 30.3, p= .001. The analysis of the inter-judge correlation yielded a correlation coefficient of 0.6. This coefficient is fairly weak considering the impact of the assessment on students’ future academic development. To ameliorate the perennial problem of subjectivity in performance assessment, the portfolio assessment has been suggested as a compliment to the traditional “panel assessment” of practical performance examination taken by performing arts students of dance.