Although entrance test criteria seem decisive for accessing higher music education programmes, and problems and challenges with the assessment process are reported, the area is largely unexplored. This article concerns how entrance auditions, specifically primary instrument auditions for Swedish specialist music teacher programmes, are examined and discussed. The data comprise video-documented auditions, focus group conversations, and stimulated-recall-based interviews involving assessor groups at four music education departments. Social-semiotic theory is used to study how assessors judge applicants' knowledge representations in audition performances. A music-centred assessment culture is constructed, emphasising assessments of technical, communicative, and genre-anchored interpretation skills essential for meeting the demands of the education and profession. Also, a person-centred assessment culture is revealed, emphasising the assessment of personal traits suitable for education and profession. The discussion addresses the reliability, credibility, and validity of assessing abilities in terms of being and behaving in a particular way.

Recent reforms in England and the USA give evidence that teaching methods and content can change rapidly, given a strong external pressure, for example through economic incentives, inspections, school choice, and public display of schools' and pupils' performances. Educational activities in the Scandinavian countries have increasingly become dominated by obligations regarding assessment and grading. A common thread is the demand for equal and just assessment and grading through clear criteria and transparent processes. Torrance states that clarity in assessment procedures, processes, and criteria has underpinned widespread use of coaching, practice, and provision of formative feedback to boost achievement, but that such transparency encourages instrumentalism. He concludes that the practice of assessment has moved from assessment of learning, through assessment for learning, to assessment as learning, with "assessment procedures and practices coming completely to dominate the learning experience" and "criteria compliance" replacing "learning". Thus, formative assessment, in spite of its proven educational potential, threatens to be deformative. In this article we will explore to what extent and how this development is visible in two cases, presenting music education in one Norwegian and one Swedish compulsory school setting. Three thematic threads run through this exploration: quality, power, and instrumentalism.

The aim of this study is to investigate and describe how a new music curriculum with defined content and assessment criteria can influence music specialist teachers’ style of thinking and conceptions of musical quality regarding lower secondary students’ creative music making.

The research questions are:

• How is composition defined in the teachers’ dialogues?
• What conceptions of quality are expressed in the teachers’ evaluations of the compositions?
• To what extent do the teachers’ knowledge requirement-based assessments differ from their first, spontaneous appreciation of the pupils’ creative music making?

The findings indicate that creative music making is a poorly delimited concept that can be used both for a musical idea and for a whole performance. In the teachers’ initial assessments of the students’ compositions, they revealed a common style of thinking based on an artistic insider-understanding of musical qualities. However, when they started discussing the compositions from the standpoint of the new curriculum and its knowledge requirements, this style of thinking was largely abolished. It was replaced by a new style of thinking in which evaluative judgments were carefully avoided in favour of factual descriptions. These findings suggest that explicit criteria can have a strong impact on the conceptions of quality that are developed within a school culture. In the case of music education, this could result in a style of thinking and a teaching that differs dramatically from both lay and professional conceptions of musical quality

This study analyses ten Swedish music teachers’ descriptions of how a new music syllabus and a new credit scale have influenced their practice. In the new curriculum, grading is introduced in year six and not, as previously, in year eight. We have therefore focused on the effects of this change on school years five to seven. The new syllabus is much more precise and explicit than the earlier one, and it is reported to have strongly affected both teachers’ and pupils’ work in the classroom. Teachers are facing a number of dilemmas when trying to combine the demands of the syllabus with their conceptions of quality in music education. 

Social media has led to new opportunities for learning music. In less formalized settings, a whole new arena for learning music has developed. The aim of this article is to investigate student teachers’ experiences of learning to play an instrument with the Internet as a teacher. The investigation was done as an action research study where twelve beginning teacher-training students were given the task to use the Internet to learn how to play an instrument. The students were organized in peer groups to help each other. Documentation of the progress happened through logbooks. The project lasted for half a year in 2011 and had a triple intention: to provide the students with experience about learning how to play by help of the Internet, for the students to learn to play a second instrument, and to investigate if and how learning practices for learning an instrument aided by the Internet could be useful in music teacher training.

In an analysis of music teachers’ collegiate discourses on upper secondary students’ ensemble playing (Zandén 2010) the teachers’ discourses were of a surprisingly lay character; the discourses seemed to a large extent to draw on everyday conceptions of quality. In a subsequent study of how the Swedish words musikalisk (musical), talang (talent) and begåvad (gifted) are used on the internet (Zandén 2011) I concluded that these concepts were seldom used in ways that hinted at the possibility that they denote developable capacities. If music teachers subscribe to this commonsensical idea of musicality as a stable, innate gift and assign pupils roles and identities accordingly, it might well influence their teaching and their expectations of progress among their pupils.

This presentation focuses on how the role of the teacher and the roles of the pupils are constituted in music teachers’ dialogues with their colleagues. The data consists of ten hours of recorded music teachers’ group-discussions on pupils’ musical performances.  Half of these discussions was recorded in 2007 and focused on 17-18-year old pupils’ ensemble playing while the other half was recorded in 2011 and focused on 15-16-year old pupils’ ensemble playing and musical compositions. Both sets of data were originally used for analysing music teachers’ assessments and conceptions of quality. Thus, the ways in which the teachers expressed themselves about teachers and pupils as such were not the focus of discursive attention, neither in the discussions nor in the ensuing analysis. In this study, the data are reanalysed in order to elicit the music teachers’ construction of pupils’ and teachers’ roles and identities as expressed in the dialogues. 

Sweden has adopted the principles of New Public Management by creating an educational market where private and public providers compete to attract school children and where the government is increasing its efforts to measure output and audit the providers. However, Sweden goes against the flow by emphasizing subject specific knowledge and skills instead of key competences. In an attempt to further natonal equivalence when it comes to education, assessment and marking, the Swedish National Agency for Education is issuing supporting kits in different subjects. We have been responsible for the design and production of the supporting kit in music for primary and lower secondary education. In this presentation, we will place this didactical material in a historical context, describe the process from commission to publication and discuss some of the considerations that have guided our work.