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Toward an Aspirational Learning Model Gleaned from Large-Scale Assessment
Read M. Diket, William Carey University
Lihua Xu, University of Central Florida
Thomas M. Brewer, University of Central Florida
Author Notes
The authors would like to thank their respective universities for the institutional support in
developing this line of research. We also thank the National Art Education Foundation (NAEF,
2010) and the National Art Education Association (NAEA) for their direct and indirect support.
We would also like to acknowledge the 2008 NAEP Arts Consortium consisting of David Burton
at Virginia Commonwealth University and Robert Sabol of Purdue University for their past and
ongoing participation in this secondary analysis.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Read Diket, Center for
Creative Scholars, William Carey University, Hattiesburg, MS, 39401, email
[email protected]; Lihua Xu, Department of Educational and Human Sciences, University
of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, 32816, email [email protected]; Thomas M. Brewer, School of
Teaching, Learning, and Leadership, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, 32816, email
[email protected].
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Abstract
The entry point for our discovery of this aspirational model was our preliminary work on
the secondary analysis of the 1997 and 2008 Mother/Child NAEP test block. This item array had
no art-making task and consists of 13 aligned questions based on and stemming from five
historical works using the Mother/Child as subject matter that remained the same in 1997 and
2008. Constructs operating in this restricted data block were identified as being art knowledge,
technical knowledge, aesthetic properties, and meaning.
Data recoding was accomplished in SPSS and further structural equation modeling
(SEM) was conducted using LISREL. Polychoric correlation matrix was used to generate the
path diagram in LISREL with 13 variables and the four constructs. Two structural models were
tested with the linear representation from art knowledge to technical to aesthetic properties to
meaning with or without the path from art knowledge to meaning.
Major results indicate that: Increased art knowledge did not significantly predict students’
understanding of how artists convey their meaning; students’ technical knowledge served as an
intervening variable between art knowledge and knowledge of aesthetic properties; and, students’
knowledge of aesthetic properties did not serve as a significant intervening variable between
technical knowledge and students’ meaning making out of art. These findings have significant
implications for designing visual arts curriculum, assessment, and for broad-ranging arts
education policy.
Keywords: NAEP, large-Scale assessment, assessment design, visual arts assessment, problembased assessment.
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Toward an Aspirational Learning Model Gleaned from Large-Scale Assessment
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only national test of
artistic learning, and reports following each administration of NAEP provide some longitudinal
data for music and the visual arts (the most often tested arts areas). Questions asked of the 8th
grade test takers link together ideationally across NAEPs. Test blocks may repeat in test cycles,
and that was the case with the visual arts tasks arrays: Bearden Block, the Portrait Block, the
Memory Box, and the Mother/Child Block. Some changes in the ways in which items are
queried did occur between 1997 and 2008, and the import of making was less overall in the 2008
NAEP for visual arts (in comparison to the 1997 NAEP for the subject). In the 2008 test cycle, a
new block was introduced; the cumulative changes resulted in less opportunity to make art and
precluded the statistical computation of a separate score for creating. Further, direct comparisons
of achievement cannot be made between the tests in 1997 and 2008 or between subject areas.
Fortunately for comparative purposes, most of the rich content of 1997 made it into the 2008
NAEP.
The entry point for our discovery of the aspirational model is our preliminary work on
the secondary analysis of the Mother/Child test block that was administered in both 1997 and
2008. This test block had no art-making task but does have 13 aligned questions based on and
stemming from five images of historical works using the Mother/Child as subject matter
exemplars. The 2008 Mother/Child block remained essentially the same as in 1997. Constructs
operating in the restricted data of the Mother/Child block were identified by the researchers as
art knowledge, technical knowledge, aesthetic properties, and meaning and accounted for all
13 items in the question block. In future analyses of restricted data, these promising constructs
and related variables will be under further examination guided by specific hypotheses. In our
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current analysis we may be unearthing existing or recognizing new models of art learning based
on these constructs and discovering new paths to teaching methodologies. In the end, NAEP just
asking students if they are taking art in schools does not provide enough information about how
and what they are being taught. More important is what students do and learn in class and how
well they demonstrate the key element of meaning making in their artistic discussion and work.
The vision for 2008 was more encompassing than was ultimately tested by the blocks.
However, sufficient breadth allowed primary and secondary analysts to consider the impact of
curricular practices that were part of the standards incentives. Both primary and secondary
analysts could remark upon some directions in hiring and instructional support within schools,
and, secondary analysts could use the early SNAP report which followed the 2008 NAEP to
interpret findings related to school, community and museum practices. The 1997 NAEP item
maps from NAEP reports in 1997 and 2008 indicated that the Mother/Child block might be a
good place to start looking for gross patterns in students’ ability to respond to questions that
queried art historical knowledge, especially by attending to the upper ranges of difficulty. The
Mother/Child was the most often used block in the NAEP 2008 for visual art, and offered a
combination of multiple choice and constructed response items ranging in difficulty level.
Visual Arts Theory and NAEP: An Overview
Brody’s aesthetic scanning (l987), Feldman’s critical method (1985), Hagaman’s
philosophical inquiry (1990), and Gardner’s developmental model (1990), all relate to explicit
expectations gleaned from NAEP Arts responding questions. It is not the intent of NAEP to test
specific instructional theories or methods. Rather NAEP in the visual arts looks at the aftermath
of instruction containing certain media, art writing exposure in school, exhibition and portfolio
usage, and context information—to what a student knows and is able to do in a subject area.
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NAEP works from a consensual frame, looking at visual arts achievement as tangible and
documentable within the process of education. Though the field would like to know what art
class, community, and museum education practices provided the greatest advantage to students
taking NAEP Arts, it is the general features embedded in all NAEP subject area blocks that assist
students in organizing the particulars in a subject area. From those general expectations for
knowledge and skills art educators can link the assessment items to the field’s aspirations by
using familiar critical strategies. In the Mother/Child block Brody’s (1987) and Feldman’s
(1976) models of inquiry would be most helpful to students as they encounter the set of questions.
However, in the Portrait and Bearden collage blocks relate more easily to Hagaman’s (1990)
community of inquiry in that each begins by setting up exemplars or a single exemplar as a
graphic model, then these blocks move to writing akin to Brody’s expressive and technical
expectations, and finally with a direct nod to Gardner (1990) these blocks reflect the goals and
values of proponents of the standards movement and the National Assessment Governing Board.
To demonstrate the ways critical theory conforms to general strategies helpful in solving
the NAEP Mother/Child block, a table was compiled for general and specific features of various
approaches known and in use in the 1990s. (See Table 1 below).
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Table 1
Critical Strategies Helpful in Solving Mother/Child Block
General
Features
Harry S.
Brody’s
Aesthetic
Scanning
Edmund
Feldman’s
Critical Method
Sally
Hagaman’s
Philosophy for
Children
Howard
Gardner’s
Development in
Art
Critical theory
provides rules
of engagement
with art
(general
knowledge of),
(technical) path
of inquiry,
sustained
engagement
with exemplar
(aesthetic
properties),
seeking
meaning or
meaning
making
Sensory
(descriptive
properties;
Formal
(analysis)
properties;
Expressive
(interpretation)
properties;
Technical
(judgement)
process
Description,
Analysis,
Interpretation,
and Judgment
Community of
inquiry;
requires
knowledge of
other works of
art as graphic
models for
student work
Conditions that
educational
practices are
reflections of
goals and
values posited
by theorists.
Posed
theoretical
model in which
intuitive
response steps
up to symbolic
recognition,
then steps again
to notational
discrimination,
then to
disciplined
knowledge, and
finally to
skilled
understanding
that embraces
all of the other
steps as capable
of contributing
to meaning
making.
A very short list of other influential models includes Wilson’s (1967) aspective
perception opens talk about what might be learned from the general environment about art
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(responding to or creating art) and what must be learned explicitly. Anderson (1993) elaborates a
postmodern search for big questions: What is this? What does it mean? What is its significance?
Anderson insists upon the impossibility of value neutrality in art. Dorn (2003) highlights higher
order thinking and advanced problem solving. Barrett (1995) refines art criticism for use with
postmodern images. Ideas like these were actively pursued in the mid eighties and 1990s when
NAEP was engaged in consensus building while formulating the arts assessment framework. The
authors share more than they omit in the model particulars. The goals and aspirations of the
NAEP matched well with those of discipline-based art education.
Tests of visual development, emphasizing art responding and making, go back as far as
Edward Thorndike (1913, 1916). Antecedents for blocks emphasizing design using everyday
items arose early in the 20th century, reiterated by Lowenfeld (1947) as development and
including manual arts and creative expression. An emphasis on metaphor rather than practicality
in design with the whisper block aligns more closely with Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) texts
published in the later part of the 20th century. Museums, schools, and media presentations of art
emerged as collaborators in arts education by mid century, and consensus building became a part
of visual art education (White, 2004).
Problem Based Approach to Large Scale Assessment
Interest in problem-based assessment for NAEP subject area tests manifested in the visual
arts blocks used in the 1997 arts assessment. The innovation to include art making, beyond
sketching, in the blocks afforded elaborative visual responses. While the seven assessment
blocks afforded by the 1997 NAEP Arts for visual arts as a subject area were sufficient to inform
two achievement outcomes (responding and creating), the shortened five-block 2008 assessment
comprises support for a single achievement outcome, responding. In some ways, the singular
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outcome measure (responding) projects the meaning seeking intent of the first decade of the
twentieth century.
In 2006, Reeff, Zabal, and Blech drafted a general framework for problem-based
assessment associated with large-scale data collection projects in national or international venues.
They report a “wide-spread consensus” that problem solving is a critical skill, one that is
relatively new to large-scale assessment. In visual art classrooms, a problem-based approach can
be likened to literacy frames Reef et al readily discussed in reading, mathematics, and science.
Reef et al (p. 7) provide a general and widely accepted definition of problem solving:
Problem solving is (goal directed) thinking and action in situations for which no routine
solution procedure is available. The problem solver has a more or less well-defined goal,
but does not immediately know how to reach it. The incongruence of the goals and
admissible operators constitutes a problem. The understanding of the problem situation
and its step-by-step transformation, based on planning and reasoning, constitute the
process of problem solving.
Reeff et al (2006) categorize problems as static or dynamic and suggest that both types
and hybrids of the two are modifiable by learning. They maintain that the problem-based
framework has potential for large-scale assessments that seek to document general mental
abilities and problem solving. Problem solving constituted an additional dimension of the NAEP
Arts blocks in 1997 and by 2008 featured creative works that worked in parallel and collectively
with 8th graders’ general knowledge of visual art and problem solving strategies.
Emergent thinking as described by cognitive neuroscientist Gazzaniga (2012), implicates
the frontal lobes and prefrontal cortex involvement “with memory and planning, cognitive
complexity, abstract thinking, initiating appropriate behavior, learning rules, and picking out
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relevant information perceived through the senses…” (p. 33). The branching of dentritic tips of
neurons, if developed as in an education, affords crossed connections advantageous in problem
solution and, potentially, problem location. What we know about the way the brain functions
impacts ideas of downward causation, and, potentially, educated behavior. Analyzing what does
happen collectively in a NAEP sample that informs a NAEP item map may replicate what
actually does happen or could happen in individual brains. The neuroscience work reported so
far suggests that growing an expansive set of possible circuits might not work as well as having a
smaller percentage of functional combinations. Work from the Sante Fe Institute, included by
Gazzaniga, suggests that we need to find the effective variables required to generate the complex
behavior of interest—as in art achievement—which may be a collective of related habits or mind
strategies in terms of process. The art field has identified strong strategies comprised of
collective behaviors that result in visual art achievement.
How conscious do students have to be while taking a NAEP assessment? Neuroscientist
Antonio Damasio (2012) hypothesizes that objects and processes confronted in daily life are
assigned value according to the needs of the individual, specifically “the homeostatic range
associated with well-being relative to the current context” (p. 52). NAEP seeks to be engaging
for students so as to prolong the willingness of students to persist in the block. Time allocated to
task blocks is limited, in part to accommodate attention. Using Damasio’s terms, a NAEP item
progression requires creating memory records of the artworks of interest and requires playing
back these via mapped images as recall. Thinking about those objects with which we have
interacted and about events, requires imaginative process. Our work as visual arts educators
requires that we examine the extent to which attention, attitude, guidance and choices are
implicated in the process of documenting achievement.
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Theoretical constructs from the arts address the behavioral aspects desirable in society
today and name components of learning. Of particular interest to the visual arts is the self in
learning and, particularly, the construction of a conscious/autobiographical representation,
consideration of context pressing from outside of the individual, and the role of active learning in
executive functioning.
Methodology
Structural Equation Modeling: Determination of an Aspirational Model
Thirteen questions on the mother/child block in the 2008 NAEP 8th grade visual arts
assessment data were of interest in this secondary data analysis. The data (n=2097) recoding was
accomplished in SPSS and further structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis was conducted
using LISREL 8.8 (Jöreskog & Sörbom, 2006). Constructed-response question were recoded:
unacceptable was coded to 0, partial response was coded 1 and acceptable as 2, failure to answer
(off task/illegible/non-ratable/omitted/not reached) was coded as missing.
Polychoric correlation matrix was used to generate the path diagram in LISREL with 13
variables (i.e. items, see appendix) and four constructs (art knowledge, technical experiences,
aesthetic properties, and meaning). Diagonally weighted least squares estimation method and
asymptotic covariance matrix were used in the analysis (see p. 196, R.B. Kline, 2005).
Evaluation of an individual model’s fit was based on consideration of the comparative fit
index (CFI), the root mean squared error of approximation (RMSEA), and the standardized root
mean squared residual (SRMR). As noted by Beauducel and Wittmann (2005) these represent
different types of fit indices—absolute (RMSEA and SRMR), which evaluate how well an a
priori model reproduces the sample data, versus incremental (CFI), which compares a model to a
more restricted, baseline model; population-based (RMSEA and CFI), which are less sensitive to
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sample size than sample-based (SRMR); and the inclusion of an adjustment for model
complexity (RMSEA) to favor simpler models versus those without the adjustment (CFI, SRMR).
The cut-off point used for RMSEA was .08 (Browne & Cudeck, 1993), SRMR was .08 (Hu &
Bentler, 1995), and CFI was .95 (Hu & Bentler, 1995).
Two structural models were calculated with the linear representation from art knowledge
to technical to aesthetic properties to meaning with or without the path from art knowledge to
meaning. Path analysis, a data analytic method, has a general utility “specifying how a set of
variables is interrelated” (DeVellis, 2003, p. 17). The hypothesized model is Figure 1. Circles
represent latent variables, rectangles represent measured variables (question items), and line with
arrow represents direct effect from one latent variable to another. Absence of a line connecting
variables implies lack of a hypothesized direct effect.
It is hypothesized in Model A that meaning can be directly predicted from aesthetic
properties and from art knowledge, knowledge of aesthetic properties is directly predicted from
technical knowledge, which in turn is directly predicted from students’ art knowledge. The
model is considered well fit (χ2 = 108.36, df = 61, p < .001, RMSEA = .022, CFI = .99, SRMR
= .033). A second model, Model B, was tested with the path from art knowledge to meaning
deleted due to its statistical insignificance (γ = -.15). The second model was considered well fit
(χ2 = 108.92, df = 62, p < .001, RMSEA = .021, CFI = .99, SRMR = .033).
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Figure 1
Model A: Path Diagram for the Four Visual Arts Constructs
Direct and indirect effects
In terms of the structural model, increased art knowledge preceded and predicted
increased technical knowledge (unstandardized coefficient = .74, p < .001), which in turn
predicted increased knowledge of aesthetic properties (unstandardized coefficient = 1.02, p
< .05), which predicted students’ understanding of how artists convey their meaning
(unstandardized coefficient = 1.21, p < .01). Increased art knowledge did not significantly predict
students’ understanding how artists convey their meaning (unstandardized coefficient = -.15, p
> .05). The significance of the intervening variables was evaluated using tests of indirect effects.
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Students’ technical knowledge served as an intervening variable between art knowledge and
knowledge of aesthetic properties (unstandardized coefficient = .75, p < .05). Students’ aesthetic
properties served a as significant intervening variable between technical knowledge and students’
meaning making out of art works (unstandardized coefficient = 1.23, p > .05).
Path of Critical Thinking in Mother/Child block
Of the two models that were tested using LISREL; the most comprehensive assessment
approach is explained as Model A. Model A, which we are defining as an aspirational model,
was our first investigation (shown in Figure 1). Model A postulates a direct path from students’
art knowledge, with a direct path postulated from art knowledge to meaning inference about
historical period. The direct path was from art knowledge to meaning was counter indicated by
the negative coefficient (-0.25). From knowledge students accrued in a section of four “cueing”
items inviting close comparisons between and among the five mother and child images, students
responded to features and comparisons relating to specific components of a Raphael mother and
child reproduction. In this model, art knowledge utilizes cuing and then follows a circular path
through technical examination and aesthetic properties identification which leads successful
students back to stylistic meaning (with positive intercepts widened from technical to aesthetic
properties to meaning). Students were not cued to look for meaning. However, the model has an
expectation that cues interpretation by students as conditional knowledge exploration that will
serve a higher order query later in the block. It is quite possible that students must perceive that
the problem set is more difficult than at first glance, and that they will need to pay attention and
stay engaged with the block in order to be successful in the problem. This makes sense with a
finding that Davis (2012) using the NAEP Data Explorer online statistical tool, found in her
study of White and Black questionnaire items and achievement. The smallest gaps in
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achievement occur between the ethnic groups when students acknowledge how hard they tried
on the test.
Making meaning or recognition is the main point of the NAEP Mother/Child test block.
In a practical sense, the story would go like this: Students in Model A are cued by the beginning
question to look for similarities in content. The next few questions probe students’ general
knowledge. Then students are asked to make several comparisons, contrasting one work with
another. A technical examination follows in the path sequence. From there, some students have
gathered enough information from previous questions that they are able to address aesthetic
properties. If the student has learned while negotiating the block of questions, then he or she may
be successful in answering the final question about historical relatedness (that is: “what do all the
technical and aesthetic questions reveal about when the art was made—the art’s conative value
stemming from the historical period, the students skill in critical analysis, and ability to access
art knowledge, and interpret symbolic associations”).
At first our team was perplexed as to why the first question was placed where it was in
the sequence. It seemed like putting the cart before the horse. Edmund Burke Feldman (1976)
would have said that the method of NAEP was flawed in that students were asked to comment
substantially about their interpretations before they studied it carefully. Moreover, the Feldman
Method forces the student to sublimate self-identification and emotive association with subject
matter so as to slow the process down and allow the artwork to be assimilated part to part
through description, gradually raising aesthetic dynamics, and lastly hazarding interpretation.
The released portion of the Mother/Child block adheres to Feldman’s approach, but the two
items reserved from the public release block do not conform to the Feldman Method, but do
align more with Anderson’s (1993) critical method. Suppose instead that there is a need for
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students to engage personally with an artistic problem by describing “aboutness.” Since the
mother child relationship is one of the foremost bonds of human kind, what better subject to grab
students’ attention! After they identified what five artworks were about, students in the problem
path grappled with a structured series of questions that probed previous knowledge and cued
students as to what to look for in the images using compare and contrast questions. The block
took students further into the technical aspects of the images so as to make them identify and
remark upon particulars. Gradually NAEP raised the ante until students were attending to
aesthetic properties. Finally, they were asked what this all meant in terms of style to period, or
about how a piece could reflect the values and ontological features of a historic period.
Here would be a simple type of skilled knowledge and stylistic awareness revealed as a
principle for learning. Howard Gardner (1990) thought of development as comprised of four
steps—intuitive, symbolic, notational, and disciplined. If students reflected skilled knowledge in
their later answers which derive from developmental steps, but are incompletely queried by the
assessment, and yet, still reach a desired metaphoric landing they could put art knowledge and
aesthetic properties together to answer historical associations. They would have reached an
aspirational level where all of the previous questions in the block make sense, and they might be
able to move freely up and down the staircase of development. In this way, students could
explore the full possibilities of skilled knowledge. Intuition would serve, symbolic understanding
would emerge freely, notation would deal with particulars, aesthetic discipline with principles,
and meaning making would use all of the steps.
When the link between general knowledge and meaning making was unspecified; a series
of four questions cued students to elements and compositional principles that diverged in the
topically related five reproductions of paintings drawn from different stylistic periods and
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contexts. Here the path to meaning making is clear, and statistically significant, however, the
culminating relationship between aesthetic properties and meaning making is less strong. The
interpretation hazarded here by the research team with restricted data is that students need to
recognize that the NAEP Mother/Child block represents a multifaceted critical analysis that
requires thinking their way or path through technical examination and comparisons of aesthetic
properties in route to establishing meaning. Students who think otherwise, or are strategically
naïve, or who are not sufficiently engaged with the test fail to answer more complex questions.
In the second analysis, Model B, the path is one of gradual understanding more like Feldman
(1976), where meaning making comes as a surprise or reprise in the last question.
Where does Explicit Understanding of Visual Art Come From in an Education?
What advantage did art class give to eighth grade students? Without knowing previous
experiences prior to the test year, or ability level, or considering race/gender/region/SES or any
other variables, the 2008 analysis reveals that taking art was associated with a consistent tenpoint advantage at each percentile level, except at the 10th standard, where the spread differed by
8 points. What is of interest is that the standard error percentiles were larger for the “yes” taking
art than for “no.” Asking if a student is taking art is not enough—what students learn and do in
class, and the meaningfulness of artistic learning to students are key elements. In ongoing
examination of the restricted data for the arts, these variables are currently under scrutiny with
specific hypotheses guiding the research.
Ambrose, Cohen, and Tannabaum (2003) include in their edited text Patricia
Hollingsworth’s discussion of an open systems approach (to explain an ecosystem of giftedness,
but appropriate to a discussion of artistic achievement). At the level of purposefulness they group
“unexplained” and “chance” processes balanced by the influence of community (media and
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peers). A conflation of influences that largely overlaps the cognitive area includes education with
the curriculum, challenging cognitive activity, nurturing, and active interdisciplinary learning.
Contributing conatively (as in values and decision processes) are teaching from home and
appreciation for achievement, operations in competitive situations, respect, responsibility,
choices, and nurturing. At emergent levels, where creativity and cognitive abilities become
expert and contributory or cross disciplines, inputs and interactions occur through the influence
of specific disciplines and product development that interact with influences of world events
stemming from human, natural, cultural/historical sensibility and opportunity to use potentials.
Knowing the sources and boundaries of influences enables individuals to find multiple means for
reaching goals that are personally productive and humane. The mind works with mental
processes termed cognitive, affective, and conative (natural tendencies, impulses, directed effort
which act on thoughts and feelings). Underlying a complete adaptive system are intelligent and
creative aspects of mental functioning, what Dan Rea (2003) calls the ‘motivated mind” but
explains using complexity theory.
Conclusion and Implications
The hypothesized model fit the observed students’ visual arts data very well. This
statistical and conceptual model seems to reflect the importance for students in arts education to
have a solid knowledge foundation. This foundation is significant in students’ successful mastery
of subsequent technical knowledge and skills. Students’ exposure to properties of aesthetics
should follow from learning of technical skills. After students learn the historical and cultural
arts knowledge, technical skills, and aesthetic properties, they appreciate art works in a deeper
level and interpret artists’ works in an analytical approach.
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These conclusions seem to have significant implications for curriculum designers,
principals, and decision makers in curriculum design in the field of visual arts education. At the
same time, it provides statistical evidence for the significance of proper question layout to
maximize test takers’ performance in arts assessment. Assessment experts and visual arts
educators are advised to consider presenting the visual arts assessment questions in the order of
arts knowledge, technical knowledge and skills, and aesthetic properties, and interpretation of art
works.
Even though this portion of our secondary analysis only looked at one of six testing
blocks (test items) and this Mother/Child block was a multiple choice and constructed response
test, the magnitude and robustness of this study and its finding have significant implications for
designing visual arts assessment, for our understanding of teaching and learning, for designing
curriculum, and for broad ranging arts education policy. One major finding aligns with Brewer
(2011) where a well designed pencil and paper test can be a curriculum device for positive and
perhaps aspirational student learning. Another major finding for our field is the impact and
power of technical knowledge on student ability to recognize and understand aesthetic
qualities/properties and to then advance to understanding the meaning being communicated in
those particular works. This finding indicates that student cannot simply gain meaning by being
taught or having knowledge about art, but rather, technical knowledge must be present to arrive
at aesthetic awareness and a work’s meaning. In a field that has deemphasized technical acuity
for knowing about art and emphasizing meaning making, it is interesting that you can’t really
“get there from here.” While our field is still in the latter grips of a discipline-base art education
world art view, we can readily recall Greer’s (1984) proclamation that it is more important to
know something about art rather than just to make it. In more recent curricular theories like
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visual culture, social justice, and arts integration with other subjects and disciplines, one must
question the role that technical knowledge plays today and how any possible diminished
technical emphasis may actually impact students’ acquisition of aesthetic understanding and
cultural meaning making.
Another interesting caveat of these findings relates to what and how art instruction takes
place in our countries’ secondary schools. Quite often art instruction primarily focuses on
developing technical skill; how real can you make something look. Does a drawing of an orange
have to have every dimple drawn to know it is an orange? When only this technical approach is
used, high school students are not being given the opportunity to gain knowledge of art
(contemporary), nor do they get the chance to derive or make meaning and investigate aesthetic
properties.
Perhaps the most significant discovery in this investigation is how the aspirational model
presents a balanced, correlated, and progressive approach to learning, curricular, and assessment.
This model contains a strong structure for learning and uses learning strategies from art class that
could significantly improve and enhance to quality of general education instruction in our
nation’s public and private schools.
The 2008 Mother/Child block remained essentially the same as 1997. However, the 2008
sample of eighth grade students included a disproportionate number of Hispanic students and a
likely increase in high poverty schools. Catholic Schools were over represented in the private
school designation. Despite these factors and a small loss of art specialist expertise in the
classrooms (65% in 2008; in 1997, 73%), and even with coding changes, the student
performance on this test block remained basically the same between the 1997 and 2008 samples.
Rather than being disappointed with no significant overall learning gain on this item, and
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recognizing the two cited demographic shifts, we might consider this finding for no decline is a
positive result for art education. The good news is that with fewer art teachers and a more diverse
ethnic and economic base of students, the results indicate a stable overall student performance on
this block.
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Appendix
Table 2
List of Coded Mother/Child Questions
VD00001 – explain what artworks 1-5 are about
VD00002 – which artworks 2-5 is twentieth century western art
VD00003 – Artworks 2-5 with style contribution to western art
VD00004 – which statement about artwork 4 is true
VD000A5 – 3 specific things about artwork 3 distance
VD000B5 – compare artwork 3 with artwork 1
VD000A6 – Details of hands from artwork 1 and 3
VD000B6 – How artist of artwork 1 used light with hand
VD00007 – three comparisons of artworks 3 and 4
VD00008 – what artist communicated in artwork 5
VD00009 – specific things about artwork 1
VD00010 – which best describes style of artwork 1
VD00011 – artworks 1, 3, 4, & 5 which painted during renaissance