Trend Analysis of Selected Art Course Offerings At Institutions Granting Art Education Degrees

Abstract

The growth and development of art and art education programs has been the subject of research reports from the 1920's to the present. Researchers have cited changes in the numbers and kinds of art courses offered by colleges and universities in the United States (Gaw, 1929; Hager & Ziegfeld, 1941; Goldwater, 1943; Manzella, 1956; Diffily, 1963), an increase in the number of graduate programs available in art and art education (Gaw, 1929; Eisner, 1965), and an increase in the number of advanced degrees conferred in art and art education (Goldwater, 1940; Eisner, 1965). However, there was no determination of the statistical significance of the changes in any of these studies, and of those studies involving the numbers and kinds of courses offered, only two were replications of earlier surveys. Since efficient assessment of significant change over time requires an analysis of data derived at several intervals from the same sample of subjects, or statistically equivalent samples of subjects, and since the replicated studies added only one more time period to each area of interest, it was difficult to use these existing studies to hypothesize any indication of trends in the growth of course offerings in art and art education. The present study was undertaken to assess the statistical significance of the change in the number of semester hours of course offerings and to determine whether specific trends within the reported growth in art and art education course offerings in higher education over the past sixty years could be ascertained by means of trend analysis, using an application of multivariate repeated-measures statistical theory. This approach has heretofore not been reported in the field of art education and should therefore be of interest to art educators concerned with advances in re-