Culturally Responsive Assessment in Music Education

Abstract

This chapter is constructed on culturally responsive teaching and assessment practices that the author has been involved in during her music teaching experiences with Asian-American children at the Petit String Orchestra and Junior Youth Orchestra at the University of Florida, and African American children in the United States and their violin experiences at Lincoln Elementary. The chapter explores how culturally responsive music-teaching practices and assessments support each other. The chapter discusses and identifies how culturally responsive assessment practices, as implemented in string teaching practices and music classrooms in the United States, enhance learning and emphasize student and culture-driven learning and, more specifically, develops a framework of action for analyzing and understanding culturally responsive teaching and assessment processes. In providing the recent literature and research in cross-cultural psychology, music psychology and cognitive neuroscience, this chapter opens up new ways of understanding differences in human cognitive functions, cross-cultural varieties in musical perceptions, music teaching, learning, and educational achievement.