Department of Dance

Advisement and Assessment

Degree Progress and Artistic Assessment

Towson University has an online system of tracking and communicating degree progress for each student. This Degree Progress Assessment is used with each adviser/advisee communication with the Registrar. The software carefully tracks each student's progress through the dance major. It also allows students to track their own progress with accuracy.

There are a series of milestones that each dance major will reach and achieve during the journey to graduation.

• Acceptance into Towson University

• Successful audition into the pre-dance major status

• Successful completion of Dance Foundational Coursework with an earned grade of B or 3.0 average

• Completion of Sophomore Juries

• For the K-12 certification, successful completion of the Praxis, Internship and Portfolio

The dance faculty have high expectations that you will put forth your best effort to grow. However, assessment is not based on effort, but on the clearly articulated criteria offered within each class syllabus. Each syllabus establishes a contract between the student and the faculty as to the goals, expectations, content and assessment of that particular course.

Students are also assessed for artistic growth using the following criteria.

Key Learning Goals for all Dance Majors

 The student will:

1. Synthesize expressive range, stylistic versatility, and high standard of rigor within healthy technical achievement and somatic understanding.

2. Analyze, intuit, deliver and evaluate the creative process for original dance choreography.

3. Demonstrate oral and written skills, critical thinking in aesthetic language, and historical/world view perspectives.

4. Define, invent, and evaluate the craft of age and talent appropriate pedagogy skills.

5. Recognize, choose, and demonstrate leadership skills.

Assessment of the Dancer's Internal Process

Artistic assessment considers the dancer's internal processes.

Dancers must be willing to:

• change and grow

• distinguish choices

• alternate between where you have been and your new choice

• change via the instructor's cueing

• self cue

• maintain new choices while in motion

If a student can self cue and maintain that choice while moving through space and time, the student has earned a mastery of the material and an A has been earned.