Program Analysis in Arts Education

Abstract

Three blind men found themselves confronted by a strange animal on the road. I've got him by the neck, which is extremely long; it's a giraffe, said the first man. These sharp curved horns tell me it's a water buffalo, chimed in the second man. thick hide is that of a rhinoceros, said the third. Each man had grabbed a different part of the beast, and since their concepts of him, constructed from the information each man had, were widely varying, they never did agree as to just what kind of creature was the object of their mutual inquiry. What they failed to do, of course, was to get themselves organized, to pool their impressions and consider the data in a rational and systematic fashion. Each of us, in our own world, also reaches out, tries to grab reality, and make some sense of things. In education our interpretation of the realities confronted has profound consequences, especially in this era of replicable models and national dissemination of research and project findings. Thus evaluation has become an integral component of every innovative effort in education, in order that it can be demonstrated that, in fact, the program brings about the changes claimed for it. An entire industry (psychometrics) has evolved to assess the effects of new programs on learning, teaching, and related aspects of school life. As never before, the assumptions on which educational schemes are based have been subjected to an astonishing barrage of systematic and occasionally objective studies. Through modern storage-retrieval methods educators have at their disposal libraries full of information on every imaginable behavior and phenomena to be found in the schools. But as with the three blind men, the efforts of evaulation in education may go awry. We also frequently take hold of elephantine problems and do an inadequate job of analysis. The weaknesses of evaluation procedures and instruments are legion. Social and behavioral scientists, who supply the bulk of our empirical procedures, are under increasing fire as the limitations of traditional assessment methodology are exposed. New evaluation designs will have to be generated to cope with the broad-based criticisms of assessment practices as well as with the rising tempo of doubt and discord over the value of contemporary educational practices. The major drawbacks of traditional evaluation which will be the concern here is its emphasis on outcome or terminal performance. For example, determining the success or failure of curriculum innovation on the basis of total change, perceived between pretest and post-test situations, is a convenient but insufficient measure of the manifold variables which deserve consideration. Terminal assessment hinders consideration of