Practical and Philosophical Reflections Regarding Aural Skills Assessment

Assessment in aural skills courses is a tricky intersection of instructors’ expectations, students’ skills in audiation, students’ perceptions and anxieties regarding assessment and performance, and the peculiarities of evaluative instruments. After several years in my teaching position at a large university, I became increasingly dissatisfied with assessment in the second-year aural skills program I coordinate. In short, I was displeased both with the nature of the student activities we evaluated and with the ways in which success on those activities was measured. Students’ and instructors’ frustrations convinced me of the need to make assessment more obviously relevant, less intimidating to students, and more reflective of students’ success in mastering the skills we hope to foster. My hope in sharing the problems I identified, and my responses to them, is to inspire introspection about what our aural skills assessment methods actually measure, the expertise we intend for students to gain from this part of their music studies, and the potentially dangerous distance between these two things.

I must acknowledge in advance that, throughout this article, I presume an orthodox approach to collegiate aural skills instruction. Such an approach provides students with strategies for completing common audiation activities such as melodic and harmonic dictation and sight-singing, alongside in-class practice employing these strategies. Students’ mastery of audiation skills is tested periodically with dictation activities (i.e., quizzes and/or exams) and singing activities (i.e., “hearings” or “audits”), student performance on these activities is measured with an assessment tool, and the measurement becomes a basis for students’ grades in the class.

It would be disingenuous to imply that this model is the only way in which an aural skills curriculum could work, or that it is without its faults.¹ But rather than attacking this broad-stroked outline, which mirrors normative curricular practice at a great many American post-secondary schools that offer music degrees (including my own), in this essay I will consider closely the role and makeup of assessment activities in this model. Doing so can strengthen the student outcomes of such programs—and our measurements of those outcomes—without upsetting the entire curricular apple cart.

PROBLEMS

I identified three overlapping problems in my aural skills program: students nervous about assessment, evaluative tools that didn’t consistently reflect student mastery of the elements being tested, and a disconnect between assessment and the larger perspective on audiation and musical listening I wanted students to gain. Each of these problems deserves a full exploration before proposing solutions to address them.

1. Assessment makes students anxious

Michael Rogers’s Teaching Approaches in Music Theory, a cornerstone of music theory pedagogy, has relatively little to say about assessment and almost nothing about aural skills assessment in particular. But in its list of sixteen “suggestions for constructing a valuable test,” there are two suggestions with asides relating to dictation tests:

Lots of shorter tests are best so that no single score is over-weighted. This is especially true of ear-training exams where the possibility of having an off day is more likely.

And:

It is wise (especially with dictation tests) to begin with a few simple items that nearly everyone can be successful with to build confidence and to help stabilize shaky nerves (emphases added).²

My experience echoes Rogers’s observations. Being assessed in any post-secondary course has potential to create anxiety, and aural skills seems to be acutely susceptible to this tendency, for a number of reasons. This kind of testing is temporal: it demands response to stimuli in a limited time with limited exposure. Students who excel academically and musically may nonetheless find themselves weak in aural skills, adding to the self-imposed pressure to do as well in this course as they’re accustomed in other music-academic contexts. Success in aural skills requires creative and abstract application of theoretical principles—application that can be difficult under the stress of a timed exam, a limited number of hearings, or a tenuous grasp of those theoretical principles in the first place. Singing for assessment, whether at sight or from...