This document summarizes the work of participants in California's Towards Arts Assessment Project (TAAP). The project participants worked on developing guidelines and plans for arts assessments. The document includes the TAAP participants' performance assessments as illustrations and as guidelines for continuing a dialogue in the feasibility and success of assessment in the arts. The participants were introduced to the concepts and terms of performance assessment. Four kinds of assessment were offered as examples: (1) enhanced multiple choice, (2) open ended problems, (3) exhibition projects, and (4) portfolios. These assessments were to contribute to the publication that would "advance dialogue in the state on assessment in the arts." Teachers were then asked to select content standards from the California visual and performing arts framework, component goals, and objectives; describe their instructional activities to teach the content standards; design an assessment of student learning; and develop rubrics or scoring guides for assessing the students' work. The prelude is built on the guidelines of the Visual and Performing Arts Framework. It not only discusses examples of assessment for the arts developed by California arts teachers in the TAAP, but it also discusses the issues underlying performance assessment. The document is divided into five chapters concerning respectively: (1) performance assessment, what it is and what it looks like, (2) assessing the arts: a challenge to teachers, (3) two examples of performance assessment in the arts, (4) the future of the TAAP, and (5) assessment in the arts, the national trend. A 19-item bibliography is included. (DK)