The Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education marks a milestone in the field of art education. Sponsored by the National Art Education Association and assembled by an internationally known group of art educators, this 36-chapter handbook provides an overview of the remarkable progress that has characterized this field in recent decades. Organized into six sections, it profiles and integrates the following elements of this rapidly emerging field: history, policy, learning, curriculum and instruction, assessment, and competing perspectives. Because the scholarly foundations of art education are relatively new and loosely coupled, this handbook provides researchers, students, and policymakers (both inside and outside the field) an invaluable snapshot of its current boundaries and rapidly growing content. In a nutshell, it provides much needed definition and intellectual respectability to a field that as recently as 1960 was more firmly rooted in the world of arts and crafts than in scholarly research.

1. Learning from Histories of Art Education: An Overview of Research and Issues
2. Questioning the Past: Contexts, Functions, and Stakeholders in 19th-Century Art Education
3. 20th-Century Art Education: A Historical Perspective
4. Policy and Arts Education
5. Art Education in a World of Cross-Purposes
6. Spirit, Mind, and Body: Arts Education the Redeemer
7. Cognitive Transfer From Arts Education to Nonarts Outcomes: Research Evidence and Policy Implications
8. Aesthetic Education: Questions and Issues
9. Varieties of Multicultural Art Education: Some Policy Issues
10. Museum Education and Controversial Art: Living on a Fault Line
11. Introduction: Development and Learning in Art
12. Researching Impossible? Models of Artistic Development Reconsidered
13. The Art of Infancy
14. Child Art After Modernism: Visual Culture and New Narratives
15. Sculpture: Representational Development in a Three-Dimensional Medium
16. Aesthetic Judgment and Reasoning
17. Learning in the Visual Arts: Characteristics of Gifted and Talented Individuals
18. Introduction to Teaching and Teacher Education
19. State of the Field: Demographics and Art Teacher Education
20. Contexts for Teaching Art
21. Interaction of Teachers and Curriculum
22. Teacher Education as a Field of Study in Art Education: A Comprehensive Overview of Methodology and Methods Used in Research About Art Teacher Education
23. An Overview of Art Teacher Recruitment, Certification, and Retention
24. The Practice of Teaching in K-12 Schools: Devices and Desires
25. Assessment and Visual Arts Education
26. Assessing Art Learning in Changing Contexts: High-Stakes Accountability, International Standards and Changing Conceptions of Artistic Development
27. The NAEP Arts Assessment: Pushing the Boundaries of Large-Scale Performance Assessment
28. The Evolution of Large-Scale Assessment Programs in the Visual Arts
29. Visualizing Judgment: Self-Assessment and Peer Assessment in Arts Education
30. Emerging Visions of Art Education
31. Discipline-Based Art Education
32. Investigating Art Criticism in Education: An Autobiographical Narrative
33. Art Education as Imaginative Cognition
34. Art and Integrated Curriculum
35. Studio Art as Research Practice
36. Curriculum Change for the 21st Century: Visual Culture in Art Education