National reform initiatives suggest the need to restructure art education to demonstrate more evidence of critical thinking. Advocates of two of the various competing paradigms dominating thinking in the field of art education posit that only their respective approaches to art study are best suited to this end. / Quasi-experimental research employing a non-equivalent control group design was employed to investigate the effects of teaching strategies associated with the two methodological orientations to art study known as the studio-based creative free-expressive approach and the Discipline-Based Art Education approach which served as the independent variables in the study. The primary dependent variable of cognitive development was pretested and posttested with the Developing Cognitive Abilities Test (DCAT) (1989), an instrument containing test items correlated to the first five levels of Bloom's (1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Handbook I: Cognitive Domain distributed within the three sub-test areas of verbal abilities, quantitative abilities, and spatial abilities. The other dependent variables of artistic aptitude and attitudes toward art in terms of tolerance for ambiguity when viewing new or unusual works of art were also pre and posttested using measures adapted from The Second Assessment of Art 1978-79: Released Exercise Set (No. 10-A-25). / As a review of the literature revealed both strong support and much criticism for each of the two art education approaches used in the experiment, all hypotheses were stated as null hypotheses. Following nineteen weekly intervention sessions, the sixth grade students in the control and experimental groups were posttested with identical forms of the instruments. Findings from t-test analyses of the differences in the difference of the means and standard deviations from pretesting to posttesting revealed no statistically significant difference at the.05 level of confidence in the performance of the control or experimental groups on any of the measures. Thus, all null hypotheses were accepted, suggesting that the methodological argument regarding the best means to enhance critical thinking skills may be a moot point and irrelevant to the goals of art education. Future researchers need to investigate the wholistic perspective provided by philosophical rather than psychological conceptions of critical thinking. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-08, Section: A, page: 2975. / Major Professor: Charles M. Dorn. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_77543 |
| Contributors | Slavik, Susan Joyce., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 487 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
Page generated in 0.0016 seconds