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Article Excerpt
Traditionally, arts education was often made peripheral to the enterprise of education in Hong Kong where greater value has been placed on academic achievement. Specifically, though drawing, painting, sculpting, designing, and collage were often integrated into primary-school curricula in regular classrooms, such activities were typically omitted from the regular secondary-school curriculum where the emphasis was on students' scholastic achievements and performance on public examinations (Wong & Cheung, 2002). Consequently, it has been widely criticized that this under-emphasis of visual arts programs might have limited Hong Kong students' exposure to the arts and their opportunities to express their abilities in expressive areas. In recent years, education reform efforts aimed to promote students' whole-person development have brought into focus the contribution of arts education to the aesthetic development of students (Curriculum Development Council, 2002). More importantly, it is realized that the arts offer much to support the academic achievement of students (see Murfee, 1995; Ruppert, 2006; Yu, 2001). Thus, a student needs to be educated to use imagination and spatial ability in problem solving without relying solely on mathematical or verbal skills, just as an artist working, for example, as a graphic designer also needs to use visual thinking, mathematics, language arts, and personal skills effectively (Clark & Zimmerman, 2004).
The reform focus on whole-person development in Hong Kong not only stimulates great interest in the development of diverse talents in students but also brings particular relevance and importance to the identification of artistically talented students, an area that needs more attention through research. In assessing students' gifts and talents, it is also noted that students may have multiple gifts and talents in several domains (mathematics and music) or in several arts areas (visual arts and dance) or may have specializations within one area (painting or sculpting). Thus, the assessment of artistic talents could be very challenging, because visual arts talents could manifest themselves in different visual arts media and in many different ways. Assessment also will become inevitably more complicated as one considers the focus on processes or potential, performances or products, creative expression, problem-solving skills, abilities to produce adult-like products, or personality characteristics and values (see Clark & Zimmerman, 2004).
Despite the intense interest in identifying students with talents in visual arts, there are few available assessment instruments yielding scores indicative of superior art abilities (Clark & Zimmerman, 2004). Clark and Wilson (1991), for example, reviewed a number of drawing tests they regarded as relevant and found them unsuitable because of the dated nature of illustrations and scoring methods used in these tests and because these old tests were never intended as diagnostic of superior abilities in the arts. Therefore, it is no surprise that the common and frequently used procedures in identifying artistically talented students for admission to programs employ multiple criteria that generally include self-nomination, a portfolio of exemplary works, and an interview. Sometimes, informal art tests and classroom teacher nomination are also included (Clark & Zimmerman).
Apart from the use of drawing tests to assess drawing abilities that reflect visual arts talents, spatial ability or performance on spatial tests has also been suggested as indicative of artistic talents, especially in artists (architects and sculptors) who use three-dimensional spatial abilities in their artwork (see Lubinski, 2003; Von Karolyi, Winner, Gray, & Sherman, 2003; Winner, French, Seliger, Ross, & Weber, 2001). Spatial ability can be broadly described as an ability to represent and transform symbolic or nonlinguistic information through space, and this ability, which involves reasoning with figures and shapes, has often been overlooked in talent searches (Gohm, Humphreys, & Yao, 1988; Humphreys & Lubinski, 1996; Humphreys, Lubinski, & Yao, 1993; Shea, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2001). Despite this neglect, there are many spatial ability tasks or measures available for assessing students (Bennett, Seashore, & Wesman, 1974; Carroll, 1993; Stumpf & Eliot, 1999). Linn and Petersen (1985), in their large-scale meta-analysis, distinguished three qualitatively different types of spatial ability. In their conceptualization, the first type involves spatial perception that requires participants to locate the horizontal or the vertical in a stationary display while ignoring distracting information. The second type involves mental rotation ability to imagine how objects will appear when they are rotated in two- or three-dimensional space. The third type involves spatial visualization that refers to complex analytic multistep processing of spatial information as in completing tasks in an embedded figures test and paper folding activity. To these three types, Halpern and LaMay (2000) added two other distinct types: Spatiotemporal ability and generation and maintenance of a spatial image. The former involves judgments about the responses to dynamic or moving visual displays, and the latter requires participants to generate an image such as the shape of a particular letter of the alphabet and then use the information in the image to perform a specified cognitive task. In reviewing categories of spatial ability tasks, Stumpf and Eliot concluded that the structure underlying performance on figural spatial tests can largely be described by four facets: dimensionality, mental rotation, memory load, and speededness. In this connection, mental rotation has often been regarded as a measure representing general spatial-reasoning ability (Casey, Nuttall, Pezaris, & Benbow, 1995). However, given that there are a variety of spatial tests assessing very different aspects of spatial ability, one would expect that some aspects of spatial ability might have more relevance to visual arts talents than others.
In the search for aspects of spatial ability indicative of visual arts talents, research studies by Winner and her colleagues on the association of dyslexia with visual-spatial ability are noteworthy (Von Karolyi et al., 2003; Winner et al., 2001). Based on observations that individuals with dyslexia report visual-spatial strengths, and findings of elevated incidence of dyslexia in certain visual-spatial professions such as visual artists, it was hypothesized that a global visual-spatial task testing the speed of recognition of impossible figures might provide an indicator of visual arts talents. Impossible figures or objects contain surface or edge violations that prevent them from existing as three-dimensional structures (see Carrasco & Seamon, 1996). Thus, an impossible figure task might also offer a promising lead to the assessment and identification of artistic talents.
In view of the lack of suitable identification or assessment instruments, Clark (1989) developed Clark's Drawing Abilities Test (CDAT) for screening and identifying students talented in visual arts for admission to the Indiana University Summer Art Institute. In the test, four drawing tasks are chosen because drawing with pencils or crayons is considered the most frequently exercised art activity and therefore the least intimidating to children for a testing situation. The four drawing tasks are: Draw an interesting house as if you were looking at it from across the street; draw a person who is running very fast; make a drawing of you and your friends...
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