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Pupils’ attitudes towards art teaching in primary school: an
evaluation tool

Abstract

Pupils’ attitudes are influencing both learning and teaching processes and are affecting
the way pupils will engage with art as adults. This paper introduces an attitude scale,
ASAES (Attitude Scale for Art Experienced in School), which measures factors that may
influence the formation of pupils’ attitudes, from pupils’ perceived abilities in art to
teachers’ art specialisation. This newly developed instrument is a Likert- scale
comprising four subscales: enjoyment, confidence, usefulness, and support needed. The
support needed dimension is an essential component in the learning process because it
represents the pupil’s perception of teacher’s feedback on how well they are coping with
the task. The ASAES was administered to 420 primary school pupils in Cyprus and its
psychometric properties are evaluated by Confirmatory Factor analysis.

Key words: student evaluation, school-based evaluation, art education, attitude scale,
evaluation tool, perceived abilities

Introduction

An important element in the process of facilitating and supporting pupils’ learning is our
willingness to really listen to pupils and understand them; particularly in the context of
art education (Wexler, 2004). By ‘understanding pupils’ we do not simply refer to
acquiring knowledge about their developmental level, abilities and learning strategies but

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