abstract: ABSTRACT This Master's Thesis gives positive testament to the idea that high school students are able to develop creative choice making skills. During a yearlong study of a beginning foundational visual arts class, a pretest and a posttest self-portrait performance assessment was given to 34 students and scored by three visual art teachers from the same school. The performance results were then analyzed to ascertain evidence of the evolution of an idea and the logistic validity of assessing growth of a student's creative choice making process. Construction of an appropriate rubric to measure student growth was imperative in the process of training visual art teachers for scoring. Findings show overwhelming evidence that students’ creative choice making abilities were developed in the three weeks of instruction between pretest and posttest. Findings also suggest that with appropriate training, groups of visual art teachers can be trained to score student art performance assessments accurately and validly within the context of state required testing. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Art 2015