Search

The purpose of this article is to invite focused discussion and critical debate about the instruments currently used to select students for art colleges in Europe and North America. At this time of significant expansion and diversification in practices of art making, we must ask if current selection instruments still work. What evidence is there to support their continued use? Are they good indicators of success in art college? Who do they advantage, and whose interests do they serve? In what ways do they contribute to, or legitimate class reproduction and class advantage in the cultural sphere? In taking up these questions, this article addresses four topics of particular relevance to the selection and admission debate: reliability, validity, predictability and equality. It reports findings from two national longitudinal research studies that examined the predictive validity of selection instruments in relation to performance in art college in Ireland. While these findings are specific to the Irish higher education context, they have relevance beyond this context given that the selection instruments used by Irish art colleges are the same as those used by the majority of art colleges across Europe and North America. (Contains 3 tables and 7 notes.)

This article examines if and to what extent a set of pre-enrolment variables and background characteristics predict first year performance in art college. The article comes from a four-year longitudinal study that followed a cohort of tertiary art entrants in Ireland from their time of entry in 2002 to their time of exit in 2006 (or before, for those who failed or dropped out). Using descriptive and inferential statistics, the article shows that portfolio score at entry and school leaving examination results predict performance in first year. The predictive validity of both measures, however, was not particularly strong. Combined, portfolio score at entry and school leaving examination only accounted for 15.5 per cent of variance in first year marks, leaving a large percentage of variance unexplained.

Arts-based researchers distinguish themselves from other qualitative researchers on the grounds that they use artistic processes and practices in their inquiries and in the communication of their research outcomes. Like artists, they operate out of a particular community of practice, with its own distinctive history of emergence, set of responsibilities, and criteria for evaluation. Given the epistemological roots of arts-based research, it is argued in this article that arts-based researchers cannot ignore the processes and practices of artists as they continue to develop and theorize a counter-hegemonic research discourse and practice to the logical rational scientific one so embedded in educational inquiry. Attending critically to artists' practices, as this article demonstrates, raises many and difficult questions about doing research in, with, and through the arts. Given that arts-based research is a long-term project, these questions need to be addressed for what they might mean for the practice of arts-based research. (Contains 5 figures and 8 footnotes.)