Teacher Decision-Making and Assessment Consistency in Process-Oriented Arts Education

Abstract

This study examines teacher decision-making and assessment consistency in process-oriented arts education by analyzing how instructors evaluate creative learning processes under different assessment conditions. The study is designed to involve approximately 60 arts teachers and 900 student portfolios from visual arts, design, creative practice, and interdisciplinary arts courses. Each portfolio is evaluated by at least three teachers, generating around 2,700 independent assessment records. Evaluation indicators include originality, technical improvement, experimentation, reflective depth, process documentation, final presentation quality, and overall achievement. The study compares open-ended teacher judgment with structured rubric-based assessment to examine changes in scoring variation, inter-rater reliability, and assessment consistency. Quantitative analysis applies intraclass correlation coefficient, generalizability theory, ANOVA, mixed-effects modeling, and variance decomposition to identify whether teacher background, teaching experience, course type, and rubric use significantly affect assessment results. Teacher interviews are further used to explain how instructors balance artistic freedom, institutional standards, and fairness in grading. The innovation of this study lies in treating arts assessment as both a pedagogical and measurement issue, providing empirical evidence on whether structured assessment tools can improve fairness and consistency without weakening professional judgment in creative education