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The efficacy of art as a medium for teaching concepts to fifth graders

This quasi-experimental study investigated the hypothesis that specially designed art lessons can be used as a vehicle to enhance the learning of specific concepts. The concepts selected were ones traditionally taught in an elementary art program coinciding with those measured on standardized tests. The selected concepts were area, volume, perimeter, congruency, pattern, and sequence.

Elementary school art lessons designed to teach specific concepts and taught by an art specialist to a treatment group of students were found, as a whole, to enhance the learning of concepts significantly over that of the comparison group of students taught in a traditional manner. All teachers provided a multimodal approach to teaching, but the treatment teacher was found to use more visual and kinesthetic modes of instruction than the comparison teachers. Students' dominant learning modalities appeared to have no influence on the amount of knowledge gained from the type of instruction received. Students who were taught by the treatment method learned more regardless of their dominant learning modalities. Students taught by the treatment teacher who exhibited a positive “feeling tone” in her classroom learned more than students taught by teachers who exhibited a negative or neutral feeling tone. As a whole, concepts transferred from the teaching situation to the testing context. The students in the treatment group were found to have scored significantly higher on the posttest than those students in the comparison group.

No significant difference was found in creativity of the artwork produced by the two groups of students. In addition, no significant relationship was found between dominant learning modality and developed ability level, race, or gender. Race and gender had no significant relationship to the amount of knowledge gained. / Ed. D.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/54809
Date January 1989
CreatorsWillett, Leslie V.
ContributorsEducational Administration, Parks, David J., Worner, Wayne M., Bloom, Leslye, Whitwell, William, Arnold, Jean B.
PublisherVirginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Source SetsVirginia Tech Theses and Dissertation
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDissertation, Text
Formatix, 207 leaves, application/pdf, application/pdf
RightsIn Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
RelationOCLC# 21573192

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