The art of looking is a museum and art gallery teaching tool at the core of the Visual Thinking Strategies, a Harvard School of Education pedagogy initiated as an educational experiment for schools across the United States almost two decades ago. Today, a large number of schools implement this teaching method to increase student engagement in a…

This paper relates visual literacy to the historical development of art education in the United States, emphasizing the work of Walter Smith, an art educator, during the later nineteenth century. The visual mode of learning, especially drawing, in public schools has been justified as a means to furthering industrialization and as an end in itself,…

A study explored how children respond to visuals and how a program of visual literacy enhances oral and written response to pictures. The first and fifth grades of two schools, one urban and one suburban, with different socioecomic groups of students, were chosen to participate in a 1-year program consisting of one visual literacy lesson per week.…

This is the seventh in a series of technical research reports by Harvard Project Zero which study artistic creation and comprehension as a means toward better art education. This study summarizes the content and practical procedures of a series of lecture-performances in different arts performed before a target audience. The lecture-performance…

Harvard Project Zero provides a series of technical research reports which study artistic creation and comprehension as a means toward better art education. The emphasis of the research is to improve art education through a better psychological understanding of symbol systems and media of art and through better understanding of the perceptual,…