The Relationship between Years of Art Training and the Use of Aesthetic Judgmental Criteria among High School Students

Abstract

In art classrooms throughout the country it is common to see teacher and student huddled together engaged in determining how well things seem to be working in the student's art product, or to see the teacher and a group of students discussing the relative merit of several works of art that the students have produced. The ability to make skillful, sensitive, and adequate judgments of the aesthetic merit of works of art is considered to be a highly desirable achievement for the art teacher as well as consumer of art and the future artist. Indeed, art criticism, as it is called, is one of the most pervasive activities of art classrooms. Criticism is seldom taught as an individual topic, but it is persistently taught in a secondary manner through the teachers' and students' continual classroom judgmental activities directed toward students' work-in-progress, completed work, and the reproductions of the work of artists. This obviously important activity of the art classroom led to the question, Just what relation does all this critical activity have to the students' own ability to make adequate judgments of works of art? In a previous study' it was noted that high school students who had taken art classes made more judgmental statements about works of art than their peers who had no art instruction, and also that as the number of years of high school art increased, the number of judgmental statements also increased. But the earlier study made distinctions only between the most gross types of judgments, namely, whether reasons were given for the judgments and how complex the judgments were. There was no attempt to determine systematically what criteria were used in justifying judgments, nor was there an assessment of the adequacy of criteria which were used. A casual examinaton of the data did not indicate much consistency among the students' judgments. Some seemed highly reasoned and adequate while others seemed narrow and inappropriate. A more detailed study of the nature of high school students' critical abilities seemed in order. The purposes of this study were: (1) to determine the nature of the criteria high school students used in judging the aesthetic merit of works of art, (2) to determine if there were differences in the criteria used by students with differing amounts of high school art training (specifically zero years, one year, and three years), and (3) to evaluate the adequacy of the criteria used by high school students in making judgments of aesthetic merit. If a high degree of relation were found to exist between high school art instruction and the ability to make adequate aesthetic judgments, then art teachers might be justifiably satisfied with their practices. However, if on the other hand few relations were found then current practices might be questioned. The study was conducted by developing a set of categories which specified the types of judgments about works of art. These categories were then used as the basis for a content analysis of high school students' judgments of a reproduction of Chagall's I and My Village.

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