Abstract
Music students at the University of Chichester Conservatoire completed questionnaires about their experience of the forced use of remote teaching and learning due to Lockdown, as imposed in the United Kingdom from March to June 2020, and how this impacted their self-beliefs, decision making processes, and methods of preparation for their performance assessments. Students had the choice to either have musical performance assessed in line with originally published deadlines (still in Lockdown) via self-recorded video or defer the assessment until the following academic year. Student’s choice to defer or submit the assessment during Lockdown was influenced by a range of forced factors, such as adaptions required by online teaching, limitations of rehearsal in their home environment, and the challenges in facilitating and recording their own assessments. Students completed online questionnaires about their self-efficacy, resilience, wellbeing, and provided free text responses explaining the reasoning for their decision to record their performance or to defer the assessment were coded to reveal patterns impacting their decision and preparation processes. Those choosing to submit their assessments demonstrated more strategies in their preparation and reported higher perceived self-efficacy scores. The specific conditions for this assessment, as a result of Lockdown, revealed correlations between resilience and both self-efficacy and wellbeing. The impact on teaching and the student experience is discussed and suggestions to support students in future settings of blended delivery are presented. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Highlights
IntroductionStudents develop their skills in performance and are assessed as they develop and progress through their degree programs
Musicians transmit their art to listeners through performance
Three students cited limiting factors in relation to their performance preparation. Unlike those who chose to defer, many of these students included several different strategies within their responses. This Lockdown period presented a unique, unprecedented situation for academia, with a sudden, dramatic shift in teaching, learning, and assessment that was outside the normal remit of expectations within the context of higher education
Summary
Students develop their skills in performance and are assessed as they develop and progress through their degree programs. These performance assessments are affected by a range of contextual and situational influences, such as the physical properties of the hall or space and interactions with others in the performance setting, even before the interpretative and evaluative judgments are considered (McPherson and Thompson, 1998). In recent decades student learning processes have been more actively integrated into the assessment process, the range of assessment strategies within the higher education sector is not diverse (Boud and Falchikov, 2006; Craddock and Mathias, 2009). Change has been seen in higher education assessment practices, an example of which can be found in Florence, where alternate practices of peer and self-assessment were adopted to engage students as active agents in their learning (Di Stasio et al, 2019)
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