What We Know

Aesthetic Appreciation

In an era of standards-based accountability measured in terms of language arts and mathematics, teaching young people the arts helps them understand aesthetic modes of thinking including perception, interpretation, judgment and feeling (Redfern, 1986). All of these are important to a well-balanced range of cognitive operations needed in all subject areas.

Broudy says that aesthetic education increases students’ abilities to form intelligent decisions about a range of issues in life based on their understanding of artworks. They "derive satisfaction and insight from works of art that express the meaning of the more complex and subtle forms of human experience" (Smith, 2005).

Other philosophers, such as Greene, believe that aesthetic education enriches students’ range of responses to artistic works, a positive good in and of itself. Eisner (2002) suggests that arts education teaches students to form qualitative judgments and to discern the subtle relationships of the parts that make up a unified work. Aesthetic judgment and valuing can transcend art lessons to incorporate multiple subject areas, such written and oral communication, in which judgment based on personal response is an important element.

Taking and Defending a Position

Valuing and reflecting on artistic experiences helps students develop perspective about their own views and the views of others, key elements to deep understanding. Students learn to take reasoned positions, to examine their ideas and to defend them. These abilities are valuable in most subject areas, and activities in which students respond to works of art reinforce these skills. An art project often begins because the artist wishes to use some artistic medium to explore or express a personal perspective or point of view (Anderson, 2004).

Implications for Assessment

Assessment has changed radically in the past decade as traditional pencil-and-paper tests have been supplemented with "authentic" assessment tasks such as student projects and portfolios, performances and presentations. Much of the early research on authentic assessment conducted in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, School District, drew heavily from the legacy of assessment in the arts (Allen, 1998).

As Castiglione (1996) notes, portfolios are historically rooted in the visual arts. Today, portfolios are used as fundamental, authentic assessment tools in most subject areas. Portfolios have several advantages.. They allow students to demonstrate samples of various forms of learning and growth over time, and they encourage students to develop responsibility for identifying their own standards of quality and selecting examples for each of those standards (Danielson and Abrutyn, 1997).