Christian Curricular Emphases and Academic Rigor in Fine Arts: A Mixed Methods Study

Abstract

This study explored the relationship between Christian curricular emphases and academic rigor in Christian secondary school’s fine arts programs and course offerings. It used convergent data transformation methods to analyze published course and program descriptions in relationship to published academic data. This study correlated these sets of variables while controlling for family income influence on academic performance metrics.The review of literature presented the foundations of Christian fine arts. It then examined qualitative areas, such as curriculum theory, Christian school curriculum, fine arts curricula emphasis, and academic rigor in fine arts. This study then considered the quantitative literature regarding academic rigor, Bible literacy, and fine arts AP course offerings. Few studies examined Christian curricular emphases, academic rigor, and fine arts together. The convergent data transformation research design consisted of qualitative and quantitative analysis. This study necessitated a population that demonstrates Christian curricular emphases, academic rigor, and fine arts programs and course offerings. Council on Educational Standards and Accountability schools meet the population needs of this study. The first phase gathered published qualitative curricular data and quantitative academic rigor data. The second phase gathered tuition and family income data to control for possible income variables. The third phase coded course descriptions for integration of faith and learning language, then transformed them into quantitative data for analysis. The fourth and last phase performed a multivariate analysis of variance with covariates on all collected data.