M.L. Damen

Short-Term Effects of Compulsory Multidisciplinary Secondary School Arts Education on Cultural Participation in the Netherlands

In 1999, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science introduced a new kind of compulsory arts education in secondary school aimed at stimulating cultural participation among Dutch youth. This article examines whether the course, called ‘Cultural and Artistic Education,’ succeeds in doing so. Data on 3,851 secondary school students (ages 14-16) in the Netherlands reveal that enrollment in Cultural and Artistic Education stimulates participation in high culture and, to a smaller degree, popular culture. The effects apply equally to students with different gender, ethnic minority, and family background status. A positive effect on attitude toward art only partly holds and is less convincing. No effects were found on the complexity of the attended cultural activities.

Interestingness and Pleasingness of Drawings from Different Age and Expertise Groups

Student groups with different levels of art expertise (art students and psychology students) judged a collection of drawings produced by people from different age and expertise groups (5-, 8-, 11-, and 14-year-old children, and adult artists and non-artists). Three assessment criteria were used, namely “interestingness,” “pleasingness,” and “overall quality” (good-poor). Previous studies had demonstrated that art experts value drawings by the youngest children and artists more highly than drawings from the other groups. In other words, they produce more U-curve appreciation patterns. Here we show that unlike in the case of naïve students, the mean judgment pattern of art experts for the criteria pleasingness and interestingness indeed form a U-curve. Furthermore, expert judges exhibited greater interdependence than naïve judges in their ratings of pleasingness and interestingness. The results are discussed in relation to contemporary models of aesthetic judgment.