This paper discusses the follow-up assessment of learning outcomes in art and craft education in the designing and implementation of which I am involved at the Finnish National Board of Education. My aim is to examine the challenges and problem settings emerging in assessment particularly in art and craft education

Assessment in art subjects has widely been considered problematic and multifaceted. Extensive assessments in these subjects have often dealt more with instruction arrangements than actual learning outcomes. Some assessments have examined teachers’ and pupils’ ideas of learning.[1] Interesting process or portfolio assessments[2] have often been too concise to allow drawing more far-reaching conclusions on the level of competence in a large group of pupils.

A national assessment of learning outcomes in art, craft and music in the ninth grade of the comprehensive school will be carried out in Finland in the spring of 2010. It aims at showing to what extent the ninth graders master matters mentioned in the objectives, contents and criteria for art and craft education in the Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic education of 2004[3].

The questions posed in this assessment are connected with the concepts of talent, creativity, competence and the possibility of artistic learning[4]. Competence assessment linked with the objectives of a particular curriculum has other starting points. It examines learning in art and craft in relation to the goals of instruction and through it is connected with the very concepts of learning and instruction and instruction paradigms represented by the curriculum in question. The Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education regards learning as an individual and communal process of constructing knowledge and skills, making cultural participation possible. Learning is seen as the result of pupils’ effective and goal-oriented activity, in which they handle and interpret the learning material on the basis of their earlier structures of knowledge.[5] The Core Curriculum can be considered a fairly clear example of the constructivist view of learning[6].

It would be unrealistic to expect that it would lead to the ultimate truth about the level of learning in these subjects, but it is true that competence can be tested with well-designed assignments. The implementation of the assessment has required answering i.a. the following questions:

Which of the objectives in line with the Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education are in the most essential manner such that a ninth-grader leaving the comprehensive school should have achieved in these subjects, i.e. which objectives should be considered the most essential? With what kind of questions and performances can competence accordant with these objectives be assessed in a test situation?

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