Boosting Student Achievement through Collaboration in Digital Arts

Time and resource limitations slow community college student matriculation through academic programs. In digital art, students must learn to integrate conceptual knowledge with compositional and creative techniques and communication skills to make authentic works of art. Learners’ familial and job obligations, the time and budgetary costs of Adobe Creative Cloud software, and limited laboratory resources exacerbate learner challenges in these courses. As a result, introductory-level digital art students have been underachieving academically.

Existing research suggested mixing social learning theories and strategies to increase academic and behavioral outcomes and creativity in technical fields of study. The purpose of this action research study was to assess the impact of technology-facilitated collaboration in a flipped-curriculum Art 112: Digital Art course at Leeward Community College. The researcher created a Google Sites module to guide learners through the art-based concepts and skills necessary to work as a design team in creating an advertisement for a client using Adobe Photoshop software. Study instrumentation included classroom assessments, observations, surveys, informal interviews and teacher reflections.

This session will reveal study results in relation to student academic and attitudinal outcomes, and the researcher will discuss methods, findings, instructional design implications, and final reflections.