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Some examiners have recently expressed concern that some teachers are allowing their students to create a relatively small small number of investigation pages. In one case an HLA student completed only about 50 pages over the two years and chose half of this number to be assessed in the final examination.
Perhaps predictably, this student did not do very well.
As is so often the case, its a quality vs. quantity issue.
Obviously it serves very little purpose if students just produce a lot of mediocre pages; but they still need to use the book – to investigate and compare art and artists, explore techniques, concepts, ideas etc.
Some teachers set a required number of pages at regular intervals – a typical amount is to aim about 20 x A4 pages in four weeks, or 10 x A3, because many students will benefit from having a set target, and, even if the quality is not great, at least they are producing something.
Once the book gets turned in, teachers can start to explain what is going well and what is not going well, and it becomes much less hypothetical.
Its true that there are many ‘unselected’ pages – but I don’t think it would be possible for a student to create 30 or 40 really strong pages unless he/she has gone through a process that involved the creation of the 100 or so that do not get chosen.
There is obviously a big conceptual, intellectual and cognitive learning process that goes on in the book, in addition to and integrated with the learning through experimentation, painting, trial and error, experimenting, making mistakes, etc.
And of course some students really take to the workbook, and spend as much time on a single page as others might on a painting: the pages become mini-works of art in themselves.
These students may well be option B.
Cheers!
