National Core Art Standards
In the United States, every state government has the freedom to decide on their own educational goals and curriculum. This allows for the individual states to have flexibility to meet the needs of their constituents. This comes at the cost of not having a consistent educational experience throughout the country. However, there does exist a document that serves as a model for all of the states to reference, the National Core Art Standards.
The NCAS are “framed by a definition of artistic literacy that includes philosophical foundations and lifelong goals, artistic processes and creative practices, anchor and performance standards that students should attain, and model cornerstone assessments by which they can be measured.”
The Standards
In this section, I will list out the various Visual Arts standards for reference. However, I will omit the elementary and middle school benchmarks to keep the page easy-to-read. For the actual document, see the bottom of this page.
Creating — Anchor Standard 1: Generate and Conceptualize Artistic Ideas and Work
Enduring Understanding
Creativity and innovative thinking are essential life skills that can be developed.
Essential Questions
- What conditions, attitudes, and behaviors support creativity and innovative thinking?
- What factors prevent or encourage people to take creative risks?
- How does collaboration expand the creative process?
Performance Levels
- HS Proficient: Use identified generative methods to formulate multiple ideas, develop artistic goals, and problem solve in media arts creation processes.
- HS Accomplished: Individually or collaboratively formulate new creative problems based on students’ existing artwork.
- HS Advanced: Visualize and hypothesize to generate plans for ideas and directions for creating art and design that can affect social change.
Enduring Understanding
Artists and designers shape artistic investigations, following or breaking with traditions in pursuit of creative artmaking goals.
Essential Questions
- How does knowing the contexts, histories, and traditions of art forms help us create works of art and design?
- Why do artists follow or break from established traditions?
- How do artists determine what resources and criteria are needed to formulate artistic investigations?
Performance Levels
- HS Proficient: Shape an artistic investigation of an aspect of present-day life using a contemporary practice of art or design.
- HS Accomplished: Choose from a range of materials and methods of traditional and contemporary artistic practices to plan works of art and design.
- HS Advanced: Choose from a range of materials and methods of traditional and contemporary artistic practices, following or breaking established conventions, to plan the making of multiple works of art and design based on a theme, idea, or concept.
Creating — Anchor Standard 2: Organize and Develop Artistic Ideas and Work
Enduring Understanding
Artists and designers experiment with forms, structures, materials, concepts, media, and art-making approaches.
Essential Questions
- How do artists work?
- How do artists and designers determine whether a particular direction in their work is effective?
- How do artists and designers learn from trial and error?
Performance Levels
- HS Proficient: Engage in making a work of art or design without having a preconceived plan.
- HS Accomplished: Through experimentation, practice, and persistence, demonstrate acquisition of skills and knowledge in a chosen art form.
- HS Advanced: Experiment, plan, and make multiple works of art and design that explore a personally meaningful theme, idea, or concept.
Enduring Understanding
Artists and designers balance experimentation and safety, freedom, and responsibility while developing and creating artworks.
Essential Questions
- How do artists and designers care for and maintain materials, tools, and equipment?
- Why is it important for safety and health to understand and follow correct procedures in handling materials, tools, and equipment?
- What responsibilities come with the freedom to create?
Performance Levels
- HS Proficient: Explain how traditional and nontraditional materials may impact human health and the environment and demonstrate safe handling of materials, tools, and equipment.
- HS Accomplished: Demonstrate awareness of ethical implications of making and distributing creative work.
- HS Advanced: Demonstrate understanding of the importance of balancing freedom and responsibility in the use of images, materials, tools, and equipment in the creation and circulation of creative work.
Enduring Understanding
People create and interact with objects, places, and design, and this defines, shapes, enhances, and empowers their lives.
Essential Questions
- How do objects, places, and design shape lives and communities?
- How do artists and designers determine goals for designing or redesigning objects, places, or systems?
- How do artists and designers create works of art or design that communicate effectively?
Performance Levels
- HS Proficient: Collaboratively develop a proposal for an installation, artwork, or space design that transforms the perception and experience of a particular place.
- HS Accomplished: Redesign an object, system, place, or design in response to contemporary issues.
- HS Advanced: Demonstrate in works of art or design how visual and material culture defines, shapes, enhances, inhibits, and/or empowers people’s lives.
Creating — Anchor Standard 3: Refine and Complete Artistic Work
Enduring Understanding
Artists and designers develop excellence through practice and constructive critique to reflect on, revise, and refine work over time.
Essential Questions
- What role does persistence play in revising, refining, and developing work?
- How do artists grow and become accomplished in art forms?
- How does collaboratively reflecting on a work help us experience it more completely?
Performance Levels
- HS Proficient: Apply relevant criteria from traditional and contemporary cultural contexts to examine, reflect on, and plan revisions for works of art and design in progress.
- HS Accomplished: Engage in constructive critique with peers, then reflect on, reengage, revise, and refine works of art and design in response to personal artistic vision.
- HS Advanced: Reflect on, re-engage, revise, and refine works of art or design considering relevant traditional and contemporary criteria as well as personal artistic vision.
Presenting — Anchor Standard 4: Select, Analyze, and Interpret Artistic Work for Presentation
Enduring Understanding
Artists and other presenters consider various techniques, methods, venues, and criteria when analyzing, selecting, and curating objects, artifacts, and artworks for preservation and presentation.
Essential Questions
- How are artworks cared for and by whom?
- What criteria, methods, and processes are used to select work for preservation or presentation?
- Why do people value objects, artifacts, and artworks, and select them for presentation?
Performance Levels
- HS Proficient: Analyze, select, and curate artifacts and/or artworks for presentation and preservation.
- HS Accomplished: Analyze, select, and critique personal artwork for a collection or portfolio presentation.
- HS Advanced: Critique, justify, and present choices in the process of analyzing, selecting, curating, and presenting artwork for a specific exhibit or event.
Presenting — Anchor Standard 5: Develop and Refine Artistic Techniques and Work for Presentation
Enduring Understanding
Artists, curators, and others consider a variety of factors and methods including evolving technologies when preparing and refining artwork for display, and when deciding if and how to preserve and protect it.
Essential Questions
- What methods, processes, and criteria are considered when preparing artwork for presentation, preservation, portfolio, or collection?
- How does assessing choices for presentation affect its meaning to the viewer?
Performance Levels
- HS Proficient: Analyze and evaluate the reasons and ways an exhibition is presented.
- HS Accomplished: Evaluate, select, and apply methods or processes appropriate to display artwork in a specific place.
- HS Advanced: Investigate, compare, and contrast methods and processes for preserving, presenting, and protecting a variety of art works.
Presenting — Anchor Standard 6: Convey Meaning Through the Presentation of Artistic Work
Enduring Understanding
Objects, artifacts, and artworks collected, preserved, or presented either by artists, museums, or other venues communicate meaning and a record of social, cultural, and political experiences resulting in the cultivating of appreciation and understanding.
Essential Questions
- What is an art museum?
- How does the presenting and sharing of objects, artifacts, and artworks influence and shape ideas, beliefs, and experiences?
- How do objects, artifacts, and artworks that are collected, preserved, or presented, cultivate appreciation and understanding?
Performance Levels
- HS Proficient: Analyze and describe the impact that an exhibition or collection has on personal awareness of social, cultural, or political beliefs and understandings.
- HS Accomplished: Make, explain, and justify connections between artists or artwork and social, cultural, and political history.
- HS Advanced: Curate a collection of objects, artifacts, or artwork to impact the viewer’s understanding of social, cultural, and/or political experiences.
Responding — Anchor Standard 7: Perceive and Analyze Artistic Work
Enduring Understanding
Individual aesthetic and empathetic awareness developed through engagement with art can lead to understanding and appreciation of self, others, the natural world, and constructed environments.
Essential Questions
- How do life experiences influence the way you relate to art?
- How does learning about art impact how we perceive the world?
- What can we learn from our responses to art?
Performance Levels
- HS Proficient: Hypothesize ways in which art influences perception and understanding of human experiences.
- HS Accomplished: Recognize and describe personal aesthetic and empathetic responses to the natural world and constructed environments.
- HS Advanced: Analyze how responses to art develop over time based on knowledge of and experience with art and life.
Enduring Understanding
Visual imagery influences understanding of and responses to the world.
Essential Questions
- What is an image?
- Where and how do we encounter images in our world?
- How do images influence our views of the world?
Performance Levels
- HS Proficient: Analyze how one’s understanding of the world is affected by experiencing visual imagery.
- HS Accomplished: Evaluate the effectiveness of an image or images to influence ideas, feelings, and behaviors of specific audiences.
- HS Advanced: Determine the commonalities within a group of artists or visual images attributed to a particular type of art, timeframe, or culture.
Responding — Anchor Standard 8: Interpret Intent and Meaning in Artistic Work
Enduring Understanding
People gain insights into meanings of artworks by engaging in the process of art criticism.
Essential Questions
- What is the value of engaging in the process of art criticism?
- How can the viewer “read” a work of art as text?
- How does knowing and using visual arts vocabularies help us understand and interpret works of art?
Performance Levels
- HS Proficient: Interpret an artwork or collection of works, supported by relevant and sufficient evidence found in the work and its various contexts.
- HS Accomplished: Identify types of contextual information useful in the process of constructing interpretations of an artwork or collection of works.
- HS Advanced: Analyze differing interpretations of an artwork or collection of works in order to select and defend a plausible critical analysis.
Responding — Anchor Standard 9: Apply Criteria to Evaluate Artistic Work
Enduring Understanding
People evaluate art based on various criteria.
Essential Questions
- How does one determine criteria to evaluate a work of art?
- How and why might criteria vary?
- How is a personal preference different from an evaluation?
Performance Levels
- HS Proficient: Establish relevant criteria in order to evaluate a work of art or collection of works.
- HS Accomplished: Determine the relevance of criteria used by others to evaluate a work of art or collection of works.
- HS Advanced: Construct evaluations of a work of art or collection of works based on differing sets of criteria.
Connecting — Anchor Standard 10: Synthesize and Relate Knowledge and Personal Experiences to Make Art
Enduring Understanding
Through artmaking, people make meaning by investigating and developing awareness of perceptions, knowledge, and experiences.
Essential Questions
- How does engaging in creating art enrich people’s lives?
- How does making art attune people to their surroundings?
- How do people contribute to awareness and understanding of their lives and the lives of their communities through artmaking?
Performance Levels
- HS Proficient: Document the process of idea development, form early-stage ideas to fully elaborated ideas.
- HS Accomplished: Utilize inquiry methods of observation, research, and experimentation to explore unfamiliar subjects through artmaking.
- HS Advanced: Synthesize knowledge of social, cultural, historical, and personal life with art-making approaches to create meaningful works of art or design.
Connecting — Anchor Standard 11: Relate Artistic Ideas and Works with Societal, Cultural, and Historical Context to Deepen Understanding
Enduring Understanding
People develop ideas and understandings of society, culture, and history through their interactions with and analysis of art.
Essential Questions
- How does art help us understand the lives of people of different times, places, and cultures?
- How is art used to impact the views of a society?
- How does art preserve aspects of life?
Performance Levels
- HS Proficient: Describe how knowledge of culture, traditions, and history may influence personal responses to art.
- HS Accomplished: Compare uses of art in a variety of societal, cultural, and historical contexts and make connections to uses of art in contemporary, local, and global contexts.
- HS Advanced: Assess the impact of an artist or a group of artists on the beliefs, values, and behaviors of a society.
Commentary
A curious, and quite important detail to notice about these standards is that familiar topics of art education are notably absent from this list. Topics such as “Elements of Design and Principles of Art,” “Impressionism,” “Surrealism,” “Perspective,” and so on, do not appear anywhere in the NCAS.
The focus of the NCAS is more towards particular mental processes that relate to artmaking, rather than any particular art-making technique or concept. This gives implementers of the NCAS to use whatever art-making techniques, concepts, or art historical connections that they seem appropriate for their particular student demographic.
AP Art and Design?
For any art teacher working in the US at the high school level, inevitably, you will have to think about how adequately your classes are preparing students for the AP Art and Design courses.
Looking at the language of the NCAS and the College Board Course and Exam Descriptions, my first impression is that the two organizations think differently about the art-making process. At least, the language they use is noticeably different.
However, seriously, we’re just making art. How different can it be? Despite all the linguistic difference over describing what happens in the classroom, how different can it be, between what the College Board wants, and what the NCAS wants? My advice on the topic: to adequately prepare students for AP without changing much of what you already should be doing, focus on this question,
How can I achieve particular effects or particular goals through my art?
Whenever you talk about some historical movement, frame it in this way. What did these people want to achieve? How did their goals change the way they made art?
Whenever students make art, drive them to be more articulate about what their intentions are. You wanted to draw an astronaut? But what is he doing? How should the viewer feel about the situation or environment? What do you want to say about astronauts or space? What did you do to make your art better communicate your idea? If you tried again, how would you make your art better?