Arts and Cultural Education in Iceland : Professor Anne Bamford

Chapter 2 World Benchmarking
2.1 Introduction
For the positive impacts of arts education to become apparent, children must experience
high quality arts education. The results from the global study of arts education suggest that in
around ¼ of all instance of arts education, the quality is so low as to negatively effect a child’s
artistic and creative development 16 . Given this, it is imperative that the arts education within
Iceland reaches certain levels of quality. This chapter outlines the basic components that
together form high quality arts education.
2.2 World standards: Defining the alpha of quality arts education
Art education – like health – is not a mono-causal phenomenon but one which hinges on
many variables pointing in the same direction. Statisticians have developed a measure of this.
The so-called Cronbach’s Alpha (Bogt, 1993) measures the consistency between factors in a
compound phenomena. The higher consistency there is between the qualities, the higher the
Cronbach Score. Statistically speaking, total consistency equals 1, whereas no consistency at all
equals 0 (Bogt, 1993).
This is certainly not to suggest that a Cronbach score can be derived for the arts by criteria,
averages, and global means. Educational systems are deeply embedded in cultural and nation
specific contexts. This is especially the case as regards education in the arts. More than any
other subject, the arts (itself a broad category) reflect unique cultural circumstances, and
consequently, so does the teaching of the subject.
So any Alpha developed must respect and encourage this diversity. Judd (Judd et al., 1993)
refers to this more as a gossamer concept, where a set of abstract constructs are grouped
together consistently to create a somewhat dependable phenomena. Just as ‘health’ may be a
collection of measurable factors (e.g. steady pulse, low cholesterol and good metabolism etc),
well-being comprises of a number of constructs such as happiness, contentment, power, social
roles and so on.
Related to arts education, we know that quality programmes have a number of measurable
characteristics in common, such as inclusion of partnerships, performances and approaches to
learning but equally they depend on attitudes of risk taking, collaboration, sharing and other
abstract constructs.
These together form the baseline alpha that needs to be considered prior to the
measurement of impact.
It is possible to draw certain overall conclusions and to find common denominators, which
can serve as a form of alpha for arts education research. Just as social science, researchers have
developed community ‘liveability’ standards, medical researchers have developed patient wellbeing
indicators and the legal system is continually called upon to make judgements based on
precedent and statutes, the arts community can now – perhaps for the first time – have a
reasonable alpha to use for ascertaining quality prior to evaluating impact.
Throughout the results of the global survey there is an unequivocal indication that certain
structures and methods of instruction are common to all quality programmes regardless of their
16 Bamford, A (2006) The Wow Factor: Global research compendium on the impact of arts in education. Waxmann, Műnchen.
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