Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Education

First Advisor/Committee Member

Arthur Ellis

Second Advisor/Committee Member

Nyaradzo Mvududu

Third Advisor/Committee Member

John Bond

Keywords

metacognition, academic vocabulary, reflection, teacher feedback, visual arts

Abstract

The study of art, especially perspective, involves the use of specialized vocabulary words. Vocabulary words can be difficult to comprehend, but when students learn to use the specialized vocabulary or academic language of a subject, the learner is better able to think about the content. While academic language is only a part of a visual art curriculum, students need support from the teacher to learn it. Metacognitive reflection (MR) offers a method to increase student learning of academic language in art specifically, and other subjects in general. Teacher feedback naturally occurs in response to students’ reflections and gives the learner direction and motivation to continue learning. This quasi-experimental study used a repeated measures design with a sample of intact middle school visual art classes to determine the influence of MR and teacher feedback on students’ ability to learn and retain academic language related to perspective drawing as measured by a multiple-choice test. This study was conducted three separate times, to improve validity. While the MR treatment groups attained and maintained greater mean gains overall, post-hoc tests revealed that differences between groups in two of three studies were not statistically significant. The groups who engaged in reflection with feedback added a weighted mean gain of d = .37 to their posttest score beyond that of the comparison groups. This finding provides moderate evidence for the efficacy of practicing reflection with feedback in favor of conventional teaching alone.

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