Identification of gifted students among cultural and linguistic minority groups and development of culturally relevant gifted programs have been problematic. In addition, although giftedness can manifest itself in many ways, few gifted programs have been established in nonacademic areas, especially in rural settings. This paper focuses on the…

This paper highlights how introductory textbooks on Egyptian art inhibit understanding by reinforcing student preconceptions, and demonstrates another approach to discussing space with a classroom exercise and software. The alternative approach, an active model for spatial representation, introduced here was developed by adapting classroom…

For many people, school reform means taking the responsibility for goal setting away from teachers and assessing common student accomplishments, but the costs and benefits of this accountability strategy have not been determined. The difference between the aims of education represented by test scores, and those represented by the activities of the…

This paper reviewed literature on cognition to help art teachers understand what they can learn from the huge body of literature that has been generated by cognitive psychologists. It is argued that, in this information society, teaching memorization skills is not enough; students must learn problem-solving skills. A long list of specific thinking…

This study explores the usefulness of a creativity construct for arts education. It is hypothesized that an arts orientation is a valid personality construct, that this orientation is correlated with contrasting cognitive skills, and that these skills are manifested in creative behaviors. Sixty-five high school seniors were given the ACT Interest…

Synergistic psychology has been proposed as a meta theory for synthesizing different psychological theories into an explanation of how social, cognitive, and biological factors interact in human behavior. The basic theoretical assumption in synergistic psychology is that internalized social interactions become higher mental functions that regulate…

This paper describes an interdisciplinary high school course, "Cultural Diversity in American Life," taught by an English teacher, a social studies teacher, and an art teacher. Designed to help students understand and accept differences in culture, the course consists of units on the black American, the American Indian, the Jewish American, and…

The case for the inclusion of aesthetic education with the traditional basic courses of reading, writing, and arithmetic is examined. The following points are emphasized in regarding arts education as a basic: (1) Aesthetic experience is basic because it is a primary form of experience on which all cognition, judgment, and action depend. It is the…

Presented at the 1979 National Art Education Association Convention on the arts in special education, the paper focuses on studies of the aesthetic and therapeutic use of special art procedures with handicapped students. The art education needs of handicapped students are briefly discussed, along with the impact and implications of new…

The document presents a report on the role and status of arts education in a national sample of 13 elementary schools. It focuses on how conditions of elementary schooling affect arts programs, whether arts education is an important part of the total educational experience, and the degree to which arts education furthers creativity and…

The University of Victoria Maltwood Museum and Art Gallery (British Columbia) recently acquired a collection of 2,000 limited edition silkscreen prints that documents the development of the Aboriginal print medium from the 1950s to the present. Master artists from all six major linguistic and cultural First Nations coastal groups of British…

This dramatic reading was created from the questions generated by a class of drama education majors at the University of Alberta (Canada) and is used to describe a case study assignment approach to teacher education in drama. Education in a democratic society is underpinned with the willingness to listen. The mythology which claims that the gulf…

This paper examines the reflections of preservice art teachers through dialogue journaling with university supervisors. Journal writing is used to encourage students to practice writing intelligently about their concerns and experiences, in a nonthreatening format where content is more important than structure. Students have two notebooks; they…

Empirical evidence is presented of the relative efficiency of two potential linkage plans to be used when equivalent test forms are being administered. Equating is a process by which scores on one form of a test are converted to scores on another form of the same test. A Monte Carlo study was conducted to examine equating stability and statistical…

A literature course entitled "The Victorian Illustrated Book: A Marriage of Image and Word," offered at Skidmore College in New York, was designed to help students make connections between art and literature. Based on the premise that illustrations in Victorian books can be "decoded" much like a written text, students were…