The way Ms. Fahrenkrog measures her students’ progress is just informal assessing of their playing in order to understand what needs to be worked on for future classses. She makes mental notes of the ensemble’s progress during every class period in order to know where to go from the present point her students are at. She uses the measure of her students’ progress as an indicator for the next class’s lesson plan.
As for evaluation, Ms. Fahrenkrog gives section playing tests every Friday, but often without a written assessment form. She doesn’t have individual playing tests very often due to the short anount of time they have for every class period. When she does do individual playing tests, they often take multiple weeks to get through, as her playing tests have multiple phases. First, she asks her students to play by themselves in her office–away from both her and the other students–and evaluate themselves using an assessment sheet. Then, at a later time, the student will play for Ms.Fahrenkrog and she will evaluate them using the same assessment sheet they used to evaulate themselves, so the students can compare what they think they need to work on with what Ms. Fahrenkrog thinks they need to work on.
Here is an example of one of those assessment sheets.
Music Ed Musings 