More About NAEP Arts

The NAEP arts assessment presents a broad view of how well America's students can respond to, create, and perform works of visual art, music, and theatre. Although an assessment was developed for dance, it was not administered due to the lack of a suitable national sample. However, dance was field tested in grades 4 and 8 in 1995, in grade 12 in 1997, along with music, theater, and visual arts.

The assessment was developed by a committee of arts and measurement experts to capture the goals of the NAEP Arts Education Assessment Framework. The framework, which describes the goals of the assessment and what kinds of exercises it ought to feature, was created by the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) through a comprehensive, national process involving teachers and researchers of the arts, measurement experts, policymakers, and members of the general public.

According to the framework, at its best, the teaching of the arts will emphasize creating and performing works of art as well as studying and analyzing existing works. Thus, meaningful assessments should be built around three arts processes—creating, performing, and responding.

• Creating refers to expressing ideas and feelings in the form of an original work of art, for example, a dance, a piece of music, a dramatic improvisation, or a sculpture.
• Performing refers to performing an existing work, a process that calls upon the interpretive or re-creative skills of the student.
• Responding refers to observing, describing, analyzing, and evaluating works of art.

In order to capture the processes of creating, performing, and responding, the arts assessment consisted of the following types of exercises at grade 8 (the assessment was only administered at grade 8 due to budget constraints):

• Authentic tasks that assessed students' knowledge and skills in creating and performing in the visual arts, music and theatre. Among other activities, students were asked to sing, create music, create and perform dances, and create works of visual art using various media. Students were also asked to evaluate their own work in written form.
• Constructed-response and multiple-choice questions that explored students' abilities to describe, analyze, interpret, and evaluate works of art in written form.

Look at a more detailed distribution of questions by item format.

NAEP also gives background questionnaires to teachers, students, and schools that are part of the NAEP sample. Responses to these questionnaires give NAEP information about how teachers teach dance, music, theatre, and visual arts, what kinds of arts learning students experience in schools, and what kinds of opportunities for arts education are made available by schools.

Learn more about NAEP, the nation's only ongoing assessment of what students know and can do in various subject areas.

View the NAEP 1997 Arts Report Card.

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Last updated 09 February 2006 (JM)