Relations Between Secondary Art Teachers' Personal Education Theories And Attitudes About Inclusion.

摘要

The goal of this study was multifold: to define secondary art teachers. personal practical theories about the purposes of art education; to examine teachers. attitudes toward the inclusion of students with learning disabilities (LD) and those with emotional/behavioral disabilities (EBD) into their classrooms; and to determine the relation between the two. Specifically, the main research question asked: Do art teachers who hold a more humanistic (i.e., self-expressive or social oriented) set of personal practical theories about the purpose of art education have more favorable attitudes toward the inclusion of students with disabilities in general education classrooms than teachers who hold a more subject centered set of personal practical theories? To answer this main question, the study first addressed two other questions: (1) Do art teachers have a simple theory about the purpose of art education or do they have a profile of personal practical theories? (2) Do art teachers have general attitudes toward the inclusion of students with disabilities or do they hold different attitudes according to the nature of the specific disability (i.e. students with learning disabilities versus students with emotional/behavioral disabilities) in general education art classrooms?;A causal comparative design was used to compare art teachers. personal practical theories about the purposes of art education and their attitudes toward the inclusion of students with LD and students with EBD in their classrooms. The Art Related Teacher Theories (ARTT) survey, created specifically for this study, was one of four measures used to determine this relation. Using art education literature, three primary purposes for art were identified and defined as self discovery, subject knowledge, and social communication. The final version of the ARTT consisted of 36 items written to reflect each of these purposes. Small pilot studies were used to revise and validate item content. To measure attitudes toward students with LD and attitudes toward students with EBD, modified versions of an existing inclusion assessment were used. The last measure collected demographic information about the subjects.;Recruitment letters with a link to the survey website were sent to 500 secondary art education teachers with at least one year of teaching experience using a list rented from the National Art Education Association.s (NAEA) teacher database. Emails were also sent to The Getty teacher exchange and other NAEA list serves. Of the 259 art teachers in grades 6 through 12 who began the surveys, 205 completed them over the three month data collection period.;Data analysis began with the use of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis of the ARTT measure. The three main purposes for art education, as defined above, were identified. Means and standard deviations indicated that art teachers generally have positive beliefs on all three measures.;To further explain art teachers. theories, exploratory and confirmatory cluster analysis methods were used. The four cluster solution (social persuasion, human expression, integrated appreciation and disciplinary expertise) best explained the variance between and within clusters and made the most sense when interpreting cluster meanings according to ARTT scales.;To explore teacher attitudes toward students with LD and students with EBD analysis of variance test comparisons found the two inclusion measures statistically significant. Mean and standard deviations comparisons indicated that art teachers tend to prefer working with students with LD over those with EBD.;To determine whether art teacher theories were related to their inclusion attitudes, tests of between-subjects effects univariate analysis of variance between art teachers. theories (clusters of beliefs) and their attitudes about inclusion for students with LD and students with EBD in art were found to be not significant.;Given the influence of teachers. personal practical theories on the way they think about the subject they teach, the ARTT is a potentially useful tool for future research that uses teacher personal practical theories about the purpose of art as a variable. Through quantitative analyses, the ARTT helped focus, synthesize and confirm three commonly referred to purposes for art education found in the literature (self discovery, subject knowledge and social communication) that are recognized by currently practicing teachers. There may not be a clear consensus as to the main purpose for art education, but the ARTT does appear to identify a common core of purposes that can be measured.;According to mean averages and correlation coefficients generated for each ARTT subscale, art teachers in this study did not appear to overwhelmingly support one purpose of art education over another. However, new theories (social persuasion, human expression, integrated appreciation and disciplinary expertise) created through the use of cluster analysis techniques indicated that art teachers did form distinct groups depending on aspects associated with each of the three ARTT purposes that teachers believe to be more important and less important. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).