Research on the level of percieving of visual arts lesson given at secondary stage of elementary education

ABSTRACTNowadays art education is much more required than ever. Resources in low quality, including bad and unqualified things and filled with only emotional elements are presented as a source of art and qualified culture and they are accepted like that. However, only individuals taken qualified art education will realize this difference. We should remember that today?s students will be producers and administrators of the future. Therefore, visual art lesson should be given required importance within the curriculum. This is not a luxury; in contrast, it is necessary. General education without art education will be incomplete and not reach to its objectives.In today?s education system, students have to take many exams throughout their educational life and they spent much time for the sake of expected success, thus this leads to becoming insignificant of the lessons such as visual arts of which students are not responsible in the exam. Yet, short-term successes will cause to the future results that cannot be recovered.The aim of this study is to assert the perceptions of students in the secondary stage of elementary education, school administrators, teachers of visual arts lesson, and parents towards visual arts lesson.A survey has been applied to the students and also a semi-structured interview form has been conducted to school administrators, visual arts lesson teachers and parents. The scope of the study has been composed of three discipline-based art education aspects which are application, art history and art criticism. Thus, the study is in the scope of ?Kettering Primary School Art Program? which is an experimental research carried out in 1968-1970The survey has been applied to totally 882 students in 13 schools of the districts of Canakkale which are Central, Lapseki, Ezine, Can and Biga. The statistical analysis of t-test, one-way ANOVA (analysis of variance) and Pearson Correlation Coefficient (r) have been calculated. In addition, other statistical measures such as frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation have been calculated. The interview form is also conducted to 15 school administrators, 12 visual arts lesson teachers and 44 parents.While the level of perception of visual arts lesson by the students in the elementary education secondary stage decreased from 6th class to 7th and 8th classes, application aspect has the highest mean score and art criticism aspect has the lowest mean score. As a result of comparison between the levels of perception for visual arts lesson according to gender variable, it has been found that perception levels of female students are higher than perception levels of male students in terms of all aspects.According to the results of interviews, it has been reached that school administrators and parents have a mainly history-based aspect for visiting museums taken place within the context of visual arts lesson. Similarly, it has been observed that most of the paintings hung on the walls of schools are related to history lesson and they do not serve for the purposes of visual arts lesson. Besides, it has been concluded that libraries of the schools have not enough resources related to art and art education and visits to museums and art galleries are applied mostly as an activity that is only happened during the week of museums.Keywords: Art, art education, visual arts lesson