From viewing to ideating: a two-cycle design-based development of an undergraduate art appreciation course and its associations with divergent thinking and creative self-efficacy

Undergraduate art appreciation courses reliably develop observation and interpretation, yet rarely carry students on to ideas of their own. This study used a two-cycle design-based development approach to redesign an undergraduate art appreciation course for students in education-related majors without specialist arts training and to characterise where the movement from viewing to ideation breaks down. Each cycle ran for sixteen weeks with the same instructor, and matched pre-post data were obtained from successive cohorts of 65 and 70 students, so comparisons across cycles are descriptive. Divergent thinking and creative self-efficacy were measured on both occasions, alongside classroom discourse, ideation artefacts and reflective journals. Cycle 1 retained a conventional viewing-to-understanding format and located the most plausible constraint at the transition from association to ideation, where association occupied fewer than a fifth of coded student turns and written tasks closed on aesthetic judgement. Cycle 2 introduced thematic units pairing works across media, ideation sketches with written rationales, structured peer feedback, and criteria rewarding originality and revision. Fluency and flexibility improved in both cycles, originality and creative self-efficacy only in Cycle 2, and elaboration in neither. The efficacy shift fell below the threshold for reliable individual change, which 30.0% of Cycle 2 students reached against 12.3% in Cycle 1. The number of ideas students recorded was associated with divergent-thinking change in Cycle 2, whereas association was the only indicator that behaved inconsistently across cycles and the only one drawn from different evidence in each. Interpretive closure persisted for a quarter of the second cohort, in students distinguished not by prior art learning or by the work they submitted but by what that work contained. Assessment criteria rather than questioning technique are most readily identified as the binding constraint on ideation in this course, yielding design principles that require testing in other settings.