Innovations and Assessment in art

This is a picture of a class mural made during my practicum. I found this to benefit the students in many ways: it made the learning environment brighter and gave them ownership of the room (at the beginning of my practicum the bulletin boards were blank and there was very little student work displayed), it helped increase student motivation to complete work to the best of their ability, and student confidence grew because they experienced success. The latter was a result of my decision on how to assess the art work. After consulting teachers and our text, I decided to give students full marks as long as they completed the art assignment and met the mutually constructed pre-estabished criteria (min. 2 colours, materials, and innovation stated or illustrated with how it related to modern-day life). I felt that this was the best method of ensuring that students were more likely to develop a life-long appreciation and disposition towards creating art. I realize that there is a need to balance grades and student creativity. My feelings are that grades stifle creativity and limit development in that students will tend to produce art work for the teacher and not themselves. I found this experience with assessment in art to influence some of the decisions I made during my practicum in other subject areas. For example, I tried to focus on the process and not the product by incorporating effort into my assessment. I included this as self-assessment and had students give themselves a mark out of three as to how hard they had tried (1 - little effort, 2 - tride hard but good have done better, 3 - best effort) when handing in assignments.