Results
The results of assessment come in a variety of forms, but two forms that are important to theatres is student outcome and audience outcome. Student outcome results are clear evaluative pictures of what students learned during their experience with your theatre. Audience outcome results are clear evaluative pictures of what audiences experience when they see your work performed. One or both of these assessment results can be organized to understand the effect of your theatre's programming on students or audience, and can be used to start a reflective cycle internally to report, plan, or change theatre programming.
Knowledge, Application, and Evaluation
One of the striking outcomes from the work of using performance assessments is that not only does application lead to better knowledge, but assessment of these leads to better evaluation. Teachers, students, and administrators in theatres will be more likely to answer these questions with confidence:
What criteria would you use to assess…?
What data was used to evaluate…?
What choice have you made…?
How would you determine the facts…?
How would you grade…?
How could you verify…?
What information would you use to prioritize…?
How would you rate…?
Good Assessment Leads to Understanding
The outcome of a well-planned assessment should yield results in six areas of understanding (Wiggins, 1998): Explanation, Interpretation, Application, Perspective, Empathy, and Self-knowledge. For example, students or audience members should be able to explain something they have seen. Students or audience members might be able to interpret, or apply, or take a perspective, in order to empathize with a character or to speak more knowingly about the knowledge they have gained as a result of a good assessment.
Rubrics for Understanding
Rubrics that were designed around these six facets of understanding (Wiggins, 1998), might have several levels of attainment. These levels of attainment might be organized from the literal to the profound, from the novice to the masterful, from the uncritical to the insightful, or from the uncritical to the intuitive, developed, or even the sophisticated.
Improving Theatre Programming
The successful attainment of understanding might lead the theatre education staff to re-visit their programming, rethink their curriculum, probe further on surveys, develop new protocols for observing, design performance assessments, or re-designing the use of portfolios of student work so that assessing becomes more a process of good teaching and learning, and less a snapshot of temporary work.