APME Los Angeles 2024

This presentation argues that, as educators, we should adapt current music technology assessment strategies to better reflect modern music technology concepts. Music technology has become a core concept within many contemporary music practices, and music technology is sometimes described as an instrument all its own. Teaching music technology concepts can therefore help maintain student engagement, encourage authentic music making, and acknowledge student musical culture. Assessment standards often provide educators with a framework that parallels their classroom goals, and are often used as classroom guidelines (Parkes & Burrack, 2020). They’re also one of the fairly centralized toolkit items that are available to teachers in our society. It’s for these reasons that I believe we should update our assessment strategies in order to add to our toolkits as educators. There’s a variety and depth to our assessment standards for subjects like music performance or music composition, and this presentation argues for a similar variety and depth in our music tech standards. Appending our music tech assessment strategies is a concrete action that we can take to help educators looking to incorporate music tech as a subject within their classroom. Our current assessment standards for music technology are in some ways very limited, and should be appended for the modern age. In this talk, we will look at current assessment standards for music technology in the classroom, and offer examples of how we can add to our current systems.