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

individual help and attention received. Three others look at reasons for liking their
teacher. Lastly, one item may be called long shot because it indirectly investigate
teachers’ attitudes towards art, as a non-important subject and suggests that teachers may
use the time allocated to art inappropriately and thus reduce the art opportunities offered
to pupils. Yet this item was included because of what pupils said during study 2 and is
very much their views on whether teachers value the subject which, we believe, will
influence pupil’s attitudes to art.

Procedure

The procedure for selecting the classes was a multi-stage cluster sampling. First potential
schools were identified, which included the full range of schools in different socio-
economic areas of the Nicosia district. Then thirteen schools (from the 48 listed in
Nicosia) were randomly selected not only to reflect the above variety, but also to include
teachers with different levels of art specialisation and ‘similar’ teaching experience
(teaching experience is another potentially important factor, but in this study there was an
effort to minimise its effects and thus be able to better explore the role of specialisation).
If teachers fitted the above criteria, their classes were selected. This procedure was
followed until the sample of the pupils would be around 10% of the top-primary grade
population of the Nicosia district.

The scale was given to the pupils prior to their art lesson. Initially pupils were asked to
complete the first page, which included five questions seeking factual information (e.g.,
age, gender). Then, they were told that the remaining of the questionnaire was about the

10

<<   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   >>

More intriguing information