INTRODUCTION:Objective assessment of seizure fluctuation in patients with refractory epilepsy in the clinical setting is difficult and subjective assessment may lead to inappropriate changes in medication. We therefore evaluated the utility of Statistical Process Control (SPC) charts as a simple objective clinical tool to demonstrate variability in seizure frequency and to assess the efficacy of drug interventions. METHODS:Total weekly seizure frequencies over 1 year were collected for 38 young people with refractory epilepsy. SPC I-charts were generated and Nelson's tests for "special" causes of variability applied. In a separate analysis, run charts were reviewed by two epileptologists blinded to clinical data who were asked to identify if and when drug interventions took place. RESULTS:The SPC charts showed that only seven out of 38 (18%) patients had stable seizure frequencies. In the others, they identified significant but short-lived increases in seizure frequency, which were followed by rapid return towards baseline independently of drug changes. A substantial reduction in seizure frequency was associated with a drug increase in only 5 (6.5%) instances. Inter-rater agreement on whether there were drug interventions and their timing was poor (κ=0.15, p=0.4). CONCLUSIONS:SPC I-charts have the potential to be used as a clinical tool to monitor seizure frequency and to evaluate efficacy of drug interventions in patients with refractory epilepsy. Epilepsy is commonly an unstable condition with fluctuations in seizure frequencies which are unpredictable and usually do not require a change in treatment. Positive responses to treatment changes are uncommon.

The arts represent a unique form of communication that can occur between artists and the individuals who encounter their works. For this communication to provide its full benefits, those individuals need to experience the work in a way that engages emotions, stimulates the senses, and challenges their minds to a process of discovery. In other words, the aesthetic experience requires works of art that can elicit such a response (supply), opportunities to encounter those works of art (access), and people who seek out such encounters and can find value in them (demand). It follows that arts education policies should support all of these conditions. (95)

Rembrandt and Learning Ralph A. Smith (bio) Introduction It appears to be a defining characteristic of Rembrandt’s works—as important as the brushstrokes, the underdrawing, the types of ground and the paints used—that they move people exceedingly. [T]hey help us feel something of what the artist may have felt about youth, old age, friendship, isolation, and love. —Anthony Bailey [For] Rembrandt, imperfections are the norm of humanity, which is why he will always speak across centuries to those for whom art might be something other than the quest for ideal form. —Simon Schama Art can arouse the senses, touch the feelings, and stir the passions. In exercising these formidable powers, the artist should respect certain limits of good taste and moral propriety. Rembrandt possessed unequal skill in depicting the passions in original ways without breaking the code. Well, hardly ever. —Gary Schwartz The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Rembrandt Project was designed to apply state-of-the-art digital technology to the development of the multiple competencies needed for understanding and appreciating [End Page 101] Rembrandt and his time. As educational consultant to the project, I was given the assignment of conceptualizing a framework that would accommodate and illuminate the project’s purposes. This meant that I not only had to refamiliarize myself with seventeenth-century Dutch art and culture and with the national and state standards for the visual arts but also acquaint myself with the standards for socials studies; both sets of standards occupy a prominent place in the project and are the subject of the third section of this article. The overarching viewpoint from which I approached my assignment, however, was that of the humanities, a topic to which I turn first. Furthermore, since the project’s foremost concern is with masterpieces of the visual arts, I thought it apposite to address briefly some issues in aesthetics, especially those that relate to experiencing artworks appropriately. Having surveyed the project from the perspectives mentioned, I then ask to what extent it was successful in avoiding the pitfalls that often frustrate the implementation of novel ideas and methods.1 The Humanities The following interpretation of the humanities is condensed from the writings of two distinguished philosophers, Albert William Levi and Walter Kaufmann, and the historian Paul Gagnon. Levi, an early member of the National Council for the Humanities and for most of his career a distinguished professor of the humanities at Washington University, was once asked to define the essence of the humanities. He replied that the purposes of the humanities are to encourage persons to “to think critically, to communicate successfully, and to walk proudly with [their] tradition.”2 Noteworthy in this terse statement is its emphasis on the procedural aspects of the humanities, that is, their effects on human actions and attitudes. Such emphasis accorded well with the tradition of the Middle Ages, which construed the humanities as skills of organizing and understanding human experience. Levi, however, also acknowledged the Renaissance conception of the humanities as subject matters, thereby paying tribute to the endeavors of Renaissance scholars who devoted themselves to recovering and transmitting the literary texts of antiquity. A strong believer in historical continuity, Levi synthesized the Medieval and Renaissance traditions by proposing that the humanities be understood as skills of communication, continuity, and criticism. These skills have their substantive grounding in languages and literatures, history, and philosophy, the latter conceived as critical reflection.3 After pondering Levi’s interpretation, I added another “c,” the arts of creation, to his troika. Thus, the humanities can be understood as indispensable to human experience because they are the arts of creation, communication, continuity, and criticism. Another view of the purposes of the humanities and their relevance to the project can be found in the writings of the historian Paul Gagnon. He [End Page 102] stressed the importance of preparing the young for citizenship, personal cultivation, and vocation within a curriculum committed to the values of equity and competence.4 Gagnon interpreted the study of history as providing critical checks on reality, imparting insights into the various ways in which persons have used historical knowledge to find their place in the flow of events, and...

The author describes an ongoing National Endowment for the Humanities project that is devoted to building multiple competences by studying Rembrandt and seventeenthcentury Dutch culture. Its uniqueness consists in its designing of a state-of-the-art Web site that interrelates the humanities, social studies, visual arts, and technology. A major goal of the project's pedagogy is the development of standards-based instructional strategies that are informed by the national standards of the social studies and visual arts. Informing this effort is a recollection of the national standards movement and an assessment of its strengths and limitations. Policy relevance consists in avoiding the miscues of the standards movement.

In this article, the author conceptualizes educational aesthetics in terms of two domains: educational aesthetics as arts education and educational aesthetics as a range of nonarts educational activities understood from artistic and aesthetic points of view. A lead is taken from Harry S. Broudy's midcentury essay "Some Duties of an Educational Aesthetics," which discusses what is involved in becoming conversant with aesthetics in contemporary society. First, the author indicates the relevance of aesthetic theories to arts education. Second, he addresses the similarities and differences between art and teaching and learning, educational criticism, and leadership. Policy relevance derives from an understanding of what is plausible and what is questionable when pondering the relationship of aesthetics and education.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art by Sybil Gordon Kantor. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002, xxv, 472 pp., $39.95. ISBN 0-262-11258-2 Sybil Kantor's history of the intellectual origins of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an engaging account of Alfred Barr, Jr.'s, pivotal role in acquainting an American audience with the modernist movement in art that had developed in Europe and the Soviet Union in the first part of the twentieth century. Scrupulously documented, Kantor's narrative relies heavily on interviews with Barr's contemporaries, his publications, and his extensive correspondence. She also limns portraits of major figures who either influenced his ideas or were instrumental in establishing MoMA. Although the book is very informative about modern art, according to its author it is not intended to be strictly a history of that art. Rather, it is devoted to Barr's early development, his personal characteristics, his attitude toward the cultural and political climate of the times, his definitions of modernism and formalism, and finally, his legacy. Kantor traces Barr's career through the decade of the 1920s, which culminated in his being named the first director of MoMA in 1929; the expansive years of the 1930s and 1940s when, as Kantor puts it, Barr and the museum were at full throttle; and the later years when Barr was relieved of his director's responsibilities to allow him to spend more time on writing and the mounting of exhibitions. He retired from the museum in 1967, began to show signs of ill health in the mid-1970s, and died at the age of 79 in 1981. The Early Years Barr began his studies in the history of art at Princeton where he took courses with Frank Jewett Mather, who taught about modern art, and with Charles Rufus Morey, a distinguished medievalist whose teaching ranged beyond the architecture and sculpture of the Middle Ages to the other arts of that era. Morey's example of comprehensiveness would later stimulate Barr to think along similar lines about modern art and the organization of MoMA. At Harvard's graduate school Barr learned the skills of connoisseurship and museum management from Paul Sachs whose students went on to become directors of major museums across America. Sachs also encouraged Barr's interest in modern art and provided him with numerous letters of [End Page 97] introduction to scholars and museum directors — and occasionally withfunds for his travels.1 Lincoln Kirstein was a close friend, art critic, and earlyally, while Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Walter Gropius, and Philip Johnson significantly affected Barr's understanding of architecture. A large cast of artists, patrons, collectors, writers, trustees, and editors of "little magazines"(so-called because of their relatively small numbers of readers) also enter the scene and play various roles. A few words are in order about Barr himself who, Kantor says, exhibited more rebelliousness, a larger vision, and greater discipline than most of those around him. Barr the Man Kantor portrays a mind and sensibility possessed of exceptional discernment for the new, the difficult, and the worthwhile in the art of the early twentieth century. Barr's feeling for order, organization, and clarity of relations; his commitment to perfection, freedom, and truth; and his faith in the capacity of modern art to overcome prejudices and improve the taste of Americans are not merely reflections of the disciplinary habits inculcated by Barr's Presbyterian upbringing. They also reveal the classical tastes acquired through his art-historical studies and echo the temper of the age.The time — the 1920s through the 1940s — valued both the rationalism of science with its methods of problem solving and the insights of psychoanalysis with its probing of the irrational. Belief in the inevitable progress promised by advances in technology was, however...

he articles on visual culture and art education in this issue are part of a series that will critically examine the belief that art education must radically alter its course. Such course correction is believed necessary if the young are to be prepared to live effectively in a culture that is increasingly reliant on visual imagery for information and entertainment. The first article, by Mary Ann Stankiewicz, locates the terminology and theory of visual culture art education in a range of disciplines in higher education that are striving to become a distinct domain of inquiry. In discussing the social, cultural, and political objectives of the proponents of visual culture, Stankiewicz recalls a number of precedents in the history of modern art education, revealing that such aims and purposes are neither novel nor revolutionary. Not content to provide a historical account of the emergence of the notion of visual culture in art education, however, Stankiewicz is committed to advancing its perspectives. Moreover, she thinks that studying visual culture is complicated because it goes beyond the goals of developing creativity, artistic talent, and aesthetic experience and emphasizes critical social and political capacities. For reform to be effective, she thinks that advocates will have to pay more attention to the reshaping of policy at national and state levels. From an alternative view, Ronald Moore sees the origin of the populist aesthetic of visual culture in the Beat generation and counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as subsequent theoretical developments in France, Britain, Germany, and the United States. Critical theory and broadly conceived cultural studies have had an especially strong influence. Moore acknowledges the importance of paying attention to the everyday but asks if ours is really an age of visual culture to the extent that proponents of visual culture say it is. He worries, moreover, about both the range of phenomena that its theorists are willing to accept as objects of study and their suggestions for methods of studying them. Recalling the fate of the Beat generation and the counterculture, he further asks whether the emphasis of visual culture studies on the quotidian and its break with mainstream aesthetics and art education theory—especially with ideas and methods that have proved successful—might contain the seeds of visual culture studies’ own destruction. In short, he asks, is not continuity preferable to disjunction? Moore recommends finding a middle ground that cultivates respect for the ordinary, although not at the expense of admiration for the extraordinary in artistic achievement. In the next edition of Arts Education Policy Review, dialogue on this new development will continue with additional essays by other scholars in the field, some who are highly critical of visual culture studies.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRalph A. SmithRalph A. Smith is a contributing editor of Arts Education Policy Review and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRalph A. SmithContributing Editor Arts Education Policy Review

I s ikiere an ideal curriculum for v iswl arts education, one that woold balance tradition and multiciilturalism? Harold Best’s belief that such is possible iri music education (see preceding article) reminded me of a similar claim I o w e made [hat featured an interpretatiiw o f discipline-based art education (DBAE). At the time, DBAE was an apprwioh to art education associated with the tklucational efforts of the Getty Center f i ,w Education in the Arts, an operating entity of the J . Paul Getty Trust.’ Ah4 the result of a change in leadership aiid reorganization in the late 1990s i i ~ Ihe (jetty, the Center for Education i r i the Arts was renamed the Getty lnslitute for Education in the Arts, and shortly thereafter was discontinued. Since h m . the terminology of DBAE has becoi:nr less evident in the writings of art edircators, but not the acceptance of the hiihic idea. Indeed, the influence of DBAE has been spread far and wide, in part h~cause its basic assumptions have beeii current i n the field of art education for’ wnie time. An impression of the continuing interest generated by the Getty’s elforts to improve the teaching of art caii be gained from a perusal of a two-year *itudv of DBAE-related literature puhli,\hed between 1982 and 1998.? But tei-minology is less important than thc [ask of coming to grips with new challenges. In the present article, I attempt a synthesis of the best in traditional thinking about art education, including DBAE, and the new demands of multiculturalism. Some might consider it too idealistic or even utopian. Yet it conveys a view of what is involved in acquiring a well-developed sense of art within a general education program. To the charge of impracticability, I retort, Never underestimate the power of ideals. Before discussing a plan, however, some background and history are in order.

he results of the Reviewing Education and the Arts Project (REAP) research study, directed by Ellen Winner and Lois T ,Hetland, were first published in a special issue of the Journul of Aesthetic E(/ucation (FallNinter 2000). During illy tenure as that journal’s editor, I had the good fortune to be able to invite thcm to contribute the REAP study and to introduce it with a short preface. 1 am now pleased to have the opportunity to respond at greater length to the tilldings of the REAP project, since I think they raise a number of questions and issues that should be addressed by anyone considering the question of justifying arts education. My rejponse draws not only on the executive summary but also on the articles publlished in the special issue, which 1 hud read several times as part of the editin@ process and then reread once more in preparing this article. The research findings. I believed, were importani enough to be brought to the attention i)f readers as rapidly as a quarterly journal permits, and my decision to publisli them has been vindicated by the intercssc and controversy that the papers have generated. Not only has the research 4,een discussed at professional meetings of educational researchers, but it has alsc~ been the subject of comments in the education section of the New York Times, on public radio, and at a Gettysponsored conference at which the special issue of the Journal of Aesthetic Education was distributed. I understand that the published proceedings of the Getty meeting are forthcoming, and they are certain to generate further interest. In addition, the National Art Education Association has scheduled the publication of the executive summary in its Advisory Series. Obviously, the REAP research has touched a nerve, not least because of its controversial conclusion that, with perhaps a notable exception or two, no strong evidence exists for positive causal relations between the study of the arts and the improvement of students’ verbal and math performance, spatial and nonverbal reasoning, and verbal creative thinking, all of which are types of academic skills and mental activities that formed the focus of the REAP inquiries. The ultimate purpose of the REAP studies, Winner and Hetland point out in their introduction to the special issue, was the improvement of evaluation and assessment in the field of arts education. Improved practice would pay greater attention to the qualitative aspects of education in the arts and thus would contrast to the currently almost exclusive use of quantitative measures that fail to capture some of the important features of learning. The executive summary highlights the principal findings of the research, and I will have little to say about them here. I will merely observe that in general the various studies seem to constitute a primarily cautionary tale warning against excessively optimistic expectations and that they are of more scientific than practical significance. Indeed, Hetland so concedes in the conclusion to her comprehensive analysis of evidence for a “Mozart Effect.”’ Alhough the evidence revealed that making music does appear to enhance one kind of spatial reasoning, Hetland nonetheless concludes that so far as the classroom is concerned music teachers should simply continue with what they are now doing.* There is no need for adjustments in particular teaching methods, for nonmusical benefits presumably will ensue automatically. Consequently, Winner and Cooper’s recommendation to mute claims about positive effects of arts education on academic performance is sound advice, particularly to those guilty of value inf la t i~n.~ An incidental discovery of the project was the need for better designed studies, for many of the ones examined had to be set aside because of design flaws. From my point of view, an interesting aspect of the REAP project is its insistence, on the one hand, on the importance of justifying arts education in its own terms and not instrumentally-that

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRalph A. SmithRalph A. Smith is professor emeritus of the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and contributing editor of Arts Education Policy Review.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRalph A. SmithRalph A. Smith is a professor emeritus of Cultural and Educational Policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRalph A. Smith Ralph A. Smith is a professor emeritus of cultural and educational policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and editor of the Journal of Aesthetic Education.

The Hamiltonian formalism for surface waves associated with the method of Watson & West (1975) is extended to handle the case of spatially varying bottom depth. This description models moderately nonlinear waves over a wider range of scales than Boussinesq-type approximations. A pseudospectral simulation code has been developed using this formalism in two horizontal dimensions. Computations using the model compare well with measurements of waves over a bar, diffractive focusing by topography, and shoaling of solitary waves. Waveforms are computed accurately until near the point of breaking.