Abstract
A growing body of work has examined the act of evaluating the quality of a musical performance. This article considers the domain of training evaluative skills in musicians, presenting assessment as a form of performance to be taught and demonstrating a gap in opportunities for trainees to develop evaluative skills within the heightened environments of live assessment scenarios. To address these needs, the concepts of Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) and distributed simulation are described, highlighting their use in training and research in other performance domains. Taking this model as a starting point, we present the Evaluation Simulator as a new tool to study and train performance evaluation. Potential applications of this prototype technology in pedagogical and research settings are then discussed.
Highlights
Evaluation is surely a skill.1 Good evaluations can be defined, and good evaluators distinguished
A great deal of study has examined the products and processes of forming music performance quality evaluations Despite the crucial role such assessments play in the development and careers of musicians, research has demonstrated a worrying degree of variability and subjectivity (Thompson and Williamon, 2003), including the influence of extra-musical visual factors (Elliott, 1995; Griffiths, 2008, 2010; Platz and Kopiez, 2013; Waddell and Williamon, 2017b), issues of rater consistency and inter-rater reliability (Wesolowski et al, 2015, 2016), and a lack of standardization in the scales and rubrics used (Russell, 2015; Kopiez et al, 2017)
While performance evaluation can be conceptualized as a unique skill to be developed, there is value in considering it as an act of performance in itself
Summary
Evaluation is surely a skill. Good evaluations can be defined, and good evaluators distinguished. In a study of external examiners in UK higher education she found deficits across six categories: (1) community, or degree to which examiners had knowledge of and participated in groups sharing good practice; (2) standards, or the knowledge of and adherence to institutional and national policies; (3) dialogue, or the role and methods of engaging with students in their feedback and fostering peer-to-peer dialogue; (4) selfregulation, or the ability to demine and improve the quality of their own feedback; (5) programme-wide approach, or knowledge of and integration with the wider institutional and learning context for the material being taught and assessed, and (6) knowledge and understanding, or familiarity with the underlying pedagogical and psychological principles of effective assessment. It is here that the “performance” of an effective evaluation is crucial
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