The impact of discipline of art criticism on printmaking courses in the institutions educating visual arts teachers

This study aims at putting forward the impact of the discipline of art criticism in terms of success, attitude, permanence and practice on printmaking courses in the institutions educating visual arts teachers.The theoretical part of the study is composed of the sections in which the printmaking and its historical development, printmaking techniques and the discipline of art criticism are presented in detail.The pretest-posttest control group design has been used out of the methods of ?experimental design? in order to obtain the quantitative data. The quantitative data have been collected via achievement test, attitude scale and assessment scale of printmaking works of students. In order to form the experimental design of the study, two groups composed of third-year students taking the course of Elective Art Workshop III (Printmaking) at Department of Painting-Crafts Education at Department of Fine Arts Education of Gazi Faculty of Education, Gazi University during 2011-2012 fall semester have been selected as subjects. Out of these groups randomized, 3R1 class has formed the experimental group; the control group has been formed by 3R3 class.The study has been continued for 7 weeks as 4-course hour per week for the students of control and experimental groups. During that period, the teaching methods supported by the discipline of art criticism have been applied to the students of experimental group; the traditional teaching methods have been applied to the students of control group during the course of elective art workshop-original printmaking.The prepared achievement test and attitude scale have been applied to the experimental and control groups involved in the study as pretest before the experimental process and as posttest after the experimental process. The prepared test has been applied 5 weeks later again as permanence test following the finalization of the experimental study in order to determine the impact of the learnt knowledge on permanence. The practical applications were evaluated by three expert. The t-test was used with a view to detemining the differences between the averages in the analysis of the obtained quantitative data within the study.At the end of the experimental processes applied in the study, it has been observed that there are significant differences in favour of the experimental group in terms of acquisition, permanence, attitude towards course and practice points between the control group to whom the traditional teaching methods have been applied and the students of experimental group to whom the teaching methods supported by the discipline of art criticism have been applied in the course of elective art workshop- original printmaking. Based on the results obtained within the scope of this study, various recommendations have been made for planning and teaching the printmaking courses as supported by the discipline of art criticism and for the researchers who have worked or are still working in the field of printmaking.