With regard to emerging requirements of the professional field, uncertainty competence is a skill to be cultivated and integrated into project management education and training. Art-based learning seems to be a promising approach because the artistic mindset is a suitable model for coping with uncertainty. However, it is widely unclear to what extent art-based learning’s experiential nature will result in soft skills development under the restrictions of distance education. The present quantitative study explores whether—in a virtual learning environment—art-based executive training has a measurable effect on uncertainty competence. Data collection and analysis applied a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design. Participants in the experimental group completed a month-long virtual training program based on visual arts. Contrary to its objective, the program did not cause meaningful changes in uncertainty competence or perceived stress but had a significant effect on participants’ attentiveness and presence. Participants achieved a higher level of mindfulness in dealing with complexity. The results imply that—even in virtual settings—art-based approaches enhance terms of perceptive capacity and social presence but need to be long-term, related to participants’ individual work-context, and disturb participants’ routines to have an effect on uncertainty competence.
Research on art-based leadership development suggests that this form of multimodal experiential learning enhances soft skills. Against this backdrop, two quantitative sub-studies from a research program on leadership development explored training effects of improvisational theater and visual arts. In both sub-studies, we applied a longitudinal pretest-posttest design and compared skills development with learner satisfaction and perceived usefulness of educational content. Our findings suggest that participants overestimate training success because very high satisfaction and favorable opinions on the programs’ practical relevance are not reflected in desired skills development. We interpret this discrepancy as a halo effect, in which the fun factor of art-based learning and other facets of aesthetic experience outshines actual learning results. Despite limitations such as small sample sizes, our findings contribute to research by putting overly positive assumptions on art-based learning’s effectiveness into perspective.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.