Project Details
Projekt
Arts education and affective skills
Applicant
Professor Dr. Andreas Brenne
Subject Area
General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning
Term
from 2016 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 322951187
The proposed project investigates the effectiveness of art education inrelation to the development of emotional competence. Starting withtheoretical findings from psychological, art-educational and aestheticconstructs, personality-building mechanisms of action from creativeand design practice are to be empirically investigated. In the two-yearproject »Art education and emotional skills«, we had students in theirfirst senior year of high school who were enrolled in basic andadvanced art education courses fill out standardized testpsychologicalquestionnaires, both at the beginning and the end of the school year2016/2017. With these questionnaires, we were able to conductnationwide longitudinal survey (total sample size N = 2130; relevantsample size n = 1232; 254 variables per time of measurement),whose quantitative components we supplemented with six qualitativegroup discussions. By examining data from the main study usingexplorative factor analysis we were able to develop scales for theassessment of artistic competencies and interests. Comparing thesetwo treatments, the main study indicates the effectiveness ofadvanced art education courses, F(1, 1228) = 19,457, p <.001, η²p = .016. The follow-up project seeks to elaborate on the aforementionedmain study by means of a decidedly theory-driven hypothesis testingand explorative data analysis. We envision the results of such ananalysis to have practical, functional, and didactic application as wellas relevance for educational policy making: (1) The projectinvestigates how art education may facilitate personal development interms of emotional competencies, factoring in variables such as levelof difficulty, gender, social milieu, and immigration background. (2) Itfurther investigates how other external factors such as students'motifs and interests in social, cultural and arts-related activities,cultural education or the description and evaluation of art educationmay contribute to facilitating emotional competencies in students.Further we use the scales for the assessment of artistic competenciesand interests developed in the previous study to predict students'emotional competencies. (3) The follow-up projects' focus lies on apath and multi-layered analysis of the previous quantitative study thatdoes justice to the data sets' potential and applicability for the areasoutlined above. As such, we will investigate how factors such asstudents' individual predisposition, classroom organization, and policy-making both on a nationwide and on a federal state levelcorrelate in their influence on developing students' emotionalcompetencies. (4) As a last step, the aforementioned qualitative studywill be reconsidered against the backdrop of the results from thequantitative analysis. A mixed methods design such as this seeks tosupplement and expand upon established approaches in the area ofart education research.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Switzerland
