Page 43 - The story of the Art of Learning

4.1 Research design, data collection and analysis
This paragraph is a short version of the article “The
Art of Learning” (2023) written by Szilvia Németh. The full article
is available here (starting on page 220).
The current 3-year-long partnership project has been a direct follow-up from Art
of Learning pilot 3 (2019 - Norwegian schools), where the results of the pilot showed that some of the executive functions of the students participating in the programme improved significantly compared to the progress of the control students.
The aim of this project has been to develop, test, and evaluate in Hungarian and Norwegian schools an innovative and creative Art of Learning approach, which focuses on developing students’ working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility - essential factors for successful learning. The aim was to strengthen students’ learning competency and their ability to learn by developing these functions.
The project has overall goals both within research, school development, and art subjects. The aim of the research was to gain a better understanding of how participation in a school programme that combines art and school subjects, and which involves all pupils in a class, can strengthen the development of executive functions (EF), learning, and mastery in children aged between 6 and 10.
The hypothesis was that children who participated in the Art of Learning project would strengthen their executive functions more than children who did not take part in the intervention, and that children with EF challenges benefit better from the intervention than children without such challenges.
During the project, the development of executive functions of pupils was measured 4 times:
» before the start (baseline)
» twice in the phase of intervention
» ten months after the end of Art of Learning lessons.
Teachers, parents, and pupils were involved in the research. Parents and teachers were asked to use the BRIEF questionnaire on assessing pupils’ development, and the pupils were tested directly
through Yellow-Red, a game-like app-based EF test.
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