Effects of Art History Instruction on Fourth and Eighth Grade Students' Abilities to Interpret Artworks Contextually

Abstract

As art educators continue to debate and interpret standards against which to measure the success of art programs at the national, state, and local levels, they regularly include learning content drawn from art history. At the national level, one of the six standards reads Understanding the visual arts in relation to history and (National Consortium of Arts Associations, 1994, p. 71). Art educators in each state are incorporating art history learning into their own state standards. For decades art educators (Chapman, 1978; Eisner, 1972; Feldman, 1970; Goldstein, 1932; Lowenfeld, 1947) have identified art history as a major content area and have succeeded in convincing others to recognize its inclusion in the art curriculum. Kern has reported evidence of art history's inclusion in state guidelines, in one form or another, for over 100 years (Kern, 1987). Traditionally art educators have focused on factual recall and style recognition as the key ideas and skills that their students should learn in art history. Gardner's (1972) early study measured the effect of instruction on students' ability to recognize style. Although facts are essential to developing art historical understanding, and style recognition is an ability exhibited by connoisseurs of art, are these the most important key ideas and abilities upon which teachers should focus their students' attention? Are there higher level understandings to which students can aspire? Kowalchuk articulates the value of higher order teaching and understanding in art education. She explains that teaching for higher order understanding aims at fostering the kinds of in-depth understandings, skills, and dispositions needed to successfully apply understandings in unfamiliar or novel contexts (Kowalchuk, 1996). Johnston, Roybal, and Parsons (1988) describe a higher level of understanding when they distinguish the relatively low level skill of style recognition from the higher level skill of understanding style. One of several higher level understandings which art historians seek is historical/cultural, or contextual, interpretation. Art historians do more than establish facts and recognize styles. They also interpret artworks from various perspectives within the historical/cultural context in which the artworks were made. This study builds upon two earlier studies that reported differences in the art historical interpretation abilities of young people and adults with various art education backgrounds (Erickson, 1994; 1995). Findings from these studies suggest that intermediate and middle school students vary in their abilities to interpret an artwork from various contextual perspectives. Evidence from these earlier studies suggests that students are more able to interpret an artwork from the perspective of an historical artist who made the work, than from the perspective of the historical viewer who had an opportunity to see the work. Evidence from these studies further suggests that students are more able to interpret an artwork from the perspective of the historical viewer than from the perspective of the historical culture at large. That is, they are more able to consider the perspective of an individual in the past viewing the work, than to consider how the work may have influenced or been influenced by the ideas, beliefs, or activities of the culture in which the work was made. In the earlier two studies students selected one artwork from a number of artworks to interpret contextually. In this study the artwork to be interpreted remains constant. This study seeks to gather additional evidence about the sequence of understandings of contextual perspectives which young people find more or less challenging to use as they consider unfamiliar artworks. That is, whether students most successfully use the historical artist's perspective, next most successfully use the historical viewer's perspective, and least successfully use the perspective of the historical culture at large. …