Increasing Art Understanding and Inspiration Through Scaffolded Inquiry

We investigated the impact of inquiry instruction within a well-established, yearlong, studio-focused high school student program based at a contemporary art museum in the southwestern United States. The pretest and posttest focused students’ attention on the work of two different contemporary artists and used the same prompts to solicit student questions about the artists’ work and ideas for the students’ own artist-inspired work. Quantitative results showed that on the posttest, students asked more questions, formed better questions, and inquired more about higher-order topics than they had done on the pretest; additionally, inspiration for their own art expanded. Qualitative findings showed that students’ inspirations for their own art expanded after engaging in scaffolded inquiry instruction.