Welcome to the APME Memphis 2025 conference. Here, you’ll be able to register for the conference and update your Sched profile. The conference schedule will be available in late spring 2025. At that time, you can view the schedule and select the presentations you’d like to attend. If you have any questions, please visit our conference website or contact us at conference@popularmusiceducation.org We look forward to coming together as a community June 4–7, 2025.
An important step to further legitimizing popular music education as a scholastic performing art is to have a standard assessment system for making value judgments about the quality of ensemble performances. After all, within the United States, many states have assessment systems for their concert bands, jazz bands, and even marching bands. Often, the assessment is competitive; other times, it is non-competitive. It stands to reason that regional and state assessment must become common with school-based popular music ensembles, too.
More informally, as schools or school systems host popular music festivals that allow scholastic ensembles to compete, the basis for success needs to be more educationally-sound than “the judge enjoyed it.” Much literature on educational assessment speaks to the “positionality” of the evaluator as important to the integrity of assessment.
Educational assessment of popular music ensembles must be structured well and executed with educational integrity. This presentation (in the demonstration category) will . . . . • provide an assessment approach for strong educational assessment of popular music ensembles; • share a resource that details criteria for assessment that is broadly applicable within instrumental popular music ensembles but specific enough to be widely applied; and • provide an explanation of the techniques for structuring assessment of popular music ensembles for competitive purposes and non-competitive assessment.
The presentation should help attendees consider the value of assessment and competition for popular music ensembles. Furthermore, the presentation should lead attendees to think about the “values” inherent to how achievement within popular music ensembles is considered and credited.
