I first had a try with Garage Band about three years ago.  I liked the ease with which I could get started, the editing tools were easy enough to use, the sound libraries are realistic, and even finishing a track was relatively simple. However, after three years of using it on and off, I am using different software for most of my recording needs.  Simply put, Garage Band is hard to play.

Let me add a little background to this.  I’m a former music teacher, performer and clinician with a Master’s degree.  I’ve got more than twenty years experience on three of the instruments I have at my disposal through Garage Band, but I struggle to play them well in this software.  Why?  They are not idiomatically designed.  I just can’t get used to trying to play guitar or bass with my fingertips on a screen, touching to play a note. I’m expecting to finger a note, and strum or pick with the other hand.  Here it takes all my fingers just to punch out a decent bass line.  Oh, and did I mention that if I don’t hit the note in exactly the right place, the string will bend?  Ask any guitar player and they’ll tell you that bends aren’t easy to do, but Garage Band makes it almost necessary to bend if you want to play at all.  I miss the feel of the strings on my fingers too.

Now I know that Apple can’t make all those things happen.  There isn’t a way, at least not yet, to make the keyboard actually feel like I’m pressing keys, or make guitar chords that feel right. (By the way, these are next to impossible to do by hand.)  But I did have a hope that perhaps someone who is an actual musician wouldn’t have to feel like a fool using this software.  After many years of playing an instrument, muscle memory takes over.  You may not realize it, but you have learned to expect certain position cues, responses and reactions from the instrument that just aren’t there in a virtual capacity.  Unless the virtual instrument is an instrument first and a computer controller second, those features may never be there.  Whose guitar has only eight frets anyway?

Just as it is important to try and design music performance software that will actually be musical, it is important to make these sorts of connections in all kinds of education. All too often, we put students through activities that don’t have clear, measurable results for them. As a result, they wind up feeling either lucky they got through the exercise, or frustrated at the amount of time they wasted preparing for an assessment that didn’t actually assess what they learned.  As instructors, we need to use this same kind of idiomatic thinking when designing assessments.  Is the assessment you are using to test students’ knowledge a real-world, natural simulation of something they may need to do later, or have you just given them busy work?  For example, giving students a multiple-choice test on writing a business plan is definitely not as valuable an exercise as actually writing one.  Think in the idiom—think demonstrable skills.  It certainly would demonstrate whether or not the students are able to write a business plan, where a multiple-choice test would only really tell me that they can pick the right answer from a list and identify the right parts of the business plan when they see them.  It’s not enough to regurgitate knowledge. Idiomatic assignments will ask students to synthesize and produce something original, with the new knowledge rolled right in.  How do you know they learned the vocabulary and concepts? If they are tested with a good assessment, they will have to use the vocabulary in order to pass.

“But wait,” the reader says, “you started with a music example and then gave a business example.  That’s too easy.”

Ok, let’s use an example from a music history class.  Quite often in these courses, there is a great deal of memorization of dates, cities, time periods, etc., and a lot of listening to music.  The simplest solution to test knowledge would be to give an exam asking for the students’ recollection of those dates and other information.  A student can easily cram for an exam like that and retain little knowledge after the fact.  A better exam might consist of essays or a written research paper instead.  Rather than having students select that Mozart was born in 1756 from a multiple-choice question, you could have a critical-thinking essay question where the students use this knowledge in his/her response.  Asking students to summarize the major composers of the classical period, pointing out stylistic similarities and differences in their music, and providing dates where applicable will get you all that information about Mozart and far more, including information on Haydn and Beethoven.  Best of all, when composers become more than names, dates, and a few catchy symphony themes, students will be able to make real connections and more readily retain the information being learned.

The suggestions I have given thus far might suggest that writing is the answer to making a more authentic, idiomatic assessment, and that’s a close guess.  However, you would be ill-advised to assign a paper about technique in a conducting class.  Remember, demonstrable skills!  Those students should be conducting and physically demonstrating the important techniques.  Thinking back to some of my college P.E. classes, how could I have written a paper about orienteering? Or write about the sophisticated techniques needed to ballroom dance?  It was far more important that I could do the correct steps or find my way than that I could write eloquently about them.

The secret to an authentic assessment is really the objectives you are trying to accomplish. It can all be boiled down to an “If…then” statement.  If students perform task X, this will demonstrate their knowledge about the concept(s) Y.  The more that task X is like a professional exercise, the more students will be encouraged to assimilate the underlying knowledge and use it properly.  A good, authentic assessment can motivate students.  This is a big reason why within the last decade, problem-based learning has been so popular, particularly in K-12. It creates highly motivated students who don’t necessarily realize they’re learning. It also greatly aids in vocabulary and concept learning because students put those concepts into actual practice while completing their assignments.

I am often talking about teaching in the idiom and its importance in producing applicable skills over rote memorization.  In virtually every discipline, there is usually an easy way and an authentic way to assess important concepts.  The easy way will let your students prove that they can recite some facts and figures for a grade.  The authentic way will guide them to produce something that will demonstrate their ability to perform the tasks and solve the problems you hope you’re preparing them for in the first place.  I know which one I’d prefer both as an instructor and as a student.  So, next time you’re thinking about how to assess your students on something important, try keepin’ it real…keepin’ it idiomatic.