While there were many questions I had about the impact of my various intentional choices throughout the MN pilot program, I limited specific data collection to testing the elementary students’ perceptions toward an art museum field trip. I wanted to know if before the field trip, students felt that art museums are places where they are told what to think. My hope was that by creating a more active learning experience in which students shared their own stories, their comfort level and then consequently their desire to visit an art museum would increase.
Methods
Simple pre and post surveys were administered with IRB approval from both the school district and Colorado College. Each teacher also submitted informal written thoughts about the benefits of the project for their students. Anecdotal evidence from conversations between students, teachers and CC students was collected as well.
A form pre/post survey was used to gather data on students’ perceptions about an art museum field trip. The surveys were kept simple so that 4th and 5th graders could easily understand the language without much direction from their teachers. Students filled out the pre-survey in their classroom before the first lesson. Students took the post-survey in their classrooms after the field trip. Students pre and post surveys were paired by assigning each student a specific combination of letters and numbers that alluded only to grade level and teacher in order to keep each test anonymous.
Click here for Samples of the Pre- and Post-Surveys
Results of Paired Samples Statistics from Pre/Post Survey
This table provides the descriptive statistics for each paired variable. For each question, the answer “no” was assigned the value zero and the answer “yes” was assigned the value of one.
In looking at all pairings, the mean values were higher (ie: closer to the value of one than to zero) for the second variable, which was the post experience. Hence, the post experience scores are closer to “Yes” for all variables. When running a Sig (2-tailed) test, the scores are all less than 0.05, thus, there is a significant difference between the pre- and post-mean scores at 95% confidence (p< 0.05). The students mostly answered “no” on the pretest to statements such as “I like to go to art museums” and “The people in the museum care about what I think about the art.” After the writing lessons and the field trip, most students responded “yes” to the same statements.
Discussion
Because of the large difference in the means of students’ answers between the pre and the post tests, I have high confidence that the MN pilot changed students’ perceptions about an art museum field trip. After the project, students felt that art museum field trips involved being able to talk about art with their friends; they also believed that their opinions were important to museum staff. Best of all, students did not “like to go to art museums” before the trip and overwhelmingly reported liking art museums at the end of the project. Hopefully this will translate into the students becoming patrons of the arts as they become adults.
One question on the pre/post survey tried to gauge the impact of student interest in writing before and after the study. While the answers reflected an upward trend toward a positive perception of writing, this trend was not statistically valid, thus I am uncertain if the MN pilot positively impacted students’ desire to write . A qualitative open-ended response to measure if students could transfer the use of detail in their writing to the new context of answering open-ended questions on the post- survey demonstrated a lack of transfer of writing skills from the lessons. Students’ answers on the post-survey were brief and lacked elaboration. This could be due to the amount of time provided in class for students to take the post-survey, as well as a lack of understanding by students that they should add detail to their answers in a survey.
Anecdotal outcomes:
Research has shown that when students have an authentic audience who will see student work, students are motivated to meet and even exceed set expectations. All three teachers reported that even their most reticent writers were focused and on-task during the project. While this could also be due to having the CC students in the room to support the process, teachers felt that their students were interested and excited to talk about the art and then develop their ideas in written form so that they could share them while at the museum.
Questions
How much impact did the community-based learning (CBL) partnership have on the students’ motivation to write? Was it the presence of the CC students or the impending sharing of their writing with a larger, more permanent audience the cause of their desire to write? I hope to explore this question by sharing the curriculum with different teachers, so that they can use it in their classrooms before a field trip. In these instances, CC students would not be supporting the writing process, nor would the videos of the students be created in the museum and shared via augmented reality with future museum visitors. This could help us understand how much the CBL components contributed to student motivation.
It would also be interesting to do a longitudinal study to determine the lasting impact of students’ desire to visit an art museum. Did this experience increase students’ cultural capital in transformative ways that last beyond their elementary school years?