Examination of secondary school students' levels of pedagogical art criticism and the effect of art criticism activities on their creativity

In this research, it is aimed to examine students' perceptions of pedagogical art criticism competence and to reveal the effect of art criticism activities on students' artistic creativity. The study conducted with 25 students attending a medium-sized secondary school in the Eastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. The researchmdesigned with the parallel design approach converging from mixed method research. In the quantitative dimension of the research, Önal and Taşkesen's (2020) "Pedagogical Art Criticism Sufficiency Perception Scale" used, and in the qualitative dimension, the "Visual Criticism Form" used. SPSS 26.00 program used in the analysis of the quantitative data of the study. Descriptive statistics used to measure Pedagogical Art Criticism Perception Levels, independent samples T-Test used to find the difference according to gender variable, and dependent samples T-Test used to determine the difference between pre-test and post-test scores of students' pedagogical art criticism perception levels. Descriptive Analysis method used to evaluate the qualitative data of the study. As a result of the research, it concluded that the pedagogical art criticism proficiency perceptions of the secondary school students were at a good level, there was a significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the students only in favor of female students, that the students were able to comment on the works of art and developed different approaches. When the artistic products created by the students compared, it determined that they were able to produce original and creative works at the end of the process. It has been observed that pedagogical art criticism activities have positive results in favor of secondary school students both in terms of art criticism and in terms of producing artistic products.