STAR-POST (Music) July 2018 STAR-POST (Music) July 2018 | Page 6

STAR: Prof. Fautley, could you describe how we can assess musical
creativity in students?
Prof. Martin Fautley: This is a really good question! For me, there are
two really important questions to ask, these are:
• Who is the assessment for?
• What will we do with the results?
In many ways, these questions are related. Let’s start with a counter-
example.
Suppose you tell a learner they have a creativity score of 48%.
• What does that actually mean?
• What would a score of 100% creativity mean?
• How can the 48% learner improve?
• What can you do as a teacher to help them improve?
You can probably see this is not very helpful, either for the teacher or the
pupils! So who is the assessment for?
There seem to me to be three main reasons for this, as I wrote about in
my book on assessment in music education (Fautley, 2010). I also drew a
diagram:
Who is this
assessment for?
Pupils
Used
to help
learning/
doing
Teacher
What happens
to the results?
Systems
Used
to audit
learning/
doing
Assessment as a means to help and audit learning and doing
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