Six critical issues in senior secondary drama performance assessment in Australia

Abstract During a study on Drama performance assessment, the many challenges of the assessment environment and assessment conditions became evident, along with the rich benefits and opportunities that performance assessment brings. This paper investigates one senior secondary performance assessment task from each of the six school sites which are aligned to one of the critical issues that emerged as themes in the analysis of data. These critical issues identify performance as fundamental to Drama, establish students’ aspirations when performing, describe students’ motivations for their performance efforts, investigate the capstone nature of Drama performance tasks, evaluate performance as a form of formative assessment, and establish the audience’s role as an influencing factor on the assessment of Drama performances. This paper describes and problematises these critical issues, foreshadowing future areas for research in Drama assessment while allowing for new understandings of Drama performance assessment to be understood in the context of existing research.