A COMPARISON OF ART PROGRAM EVALUATION RATINGS BY SELF AND VISITING TEAMS IN SELECTED NORTH CENTRAL ASSOCIATION HIGH SCHOOLS (ARIZONA).

Abstract

The investigation was concerned with 31 Arizona high schools which were members of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools and which had employed the "Evaluative Criteria," 5th Edition to evaluate themselves and which also had a visiting North Central Team evaluation. The study focused on the art section of each school's evaluation. It sought to ascertain differences in ratings between the schools' self-evaluation and the ratings of the visiting North Central Teams on the 31 evaluation items of the Art Section. A theoretical framework of six categories was constructed. This included: Fundamentals, Self-Actualization, Evaluation, Progress, Support, and General Evaluation. Related literature was reviewed for each category to provide a backdrop of concepts with which to consider the collected data. Each of the 31 evaluation items was subsumed under one or another of these categories for systematic study and reporting. The data were analyzed by use of the product-moment correlation coefficient, and the obtained indices of relationship were examined for their significance at the .05 alpha level. A second analysis involving the statistics was applied to the two sets of obtained ratings across the six categories. The factors of school size, i.e., small and large schools, and geographic location, i.e., rural and urban, were also considered statistically. It was found that there was a significant positive set of relationships across the six categories of the theoretical framework between how the schools rated themselves in the art area and how the visiting North Central teams rated the schools in the art area. School size appeared to be a factor in only two of the six categories, i.e., Self-Evaluation and General Evaluation, while geographic location appeared to be a factor in the three categories of Self-Actualization, Evaluation, and Support.