ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, education in the United States has undergone phenomenal change. Fueled by both internal and external forces, challenges arose to previously held paradigms. Congress had mandated the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), whose purpose was to survey and monitor changes in the educational accomplishments of US students. The NAEP first assessed visual arts achievement, raising numerous issues and concerns about the nature of assessment in art education. Students are central characters in the assessment-in-art-education milieu. Art teachers require a base of knowledge from which to build assessment programs and the field of assessment is growing in content, including basic vocabulary, measures, strategies, administration procedures, research methodologies, and applications. Art teachers consider a variety of issues when selecting criteria from which to evaluate students' studio products. Cross-comparisons of criteria sets used by art teachers, art students, and artists to evaluate art work reveal a number of similarities and differences among them.
