The Impact of Contemporary Art Appreciation Teaching on the Cultivation of Critical Thinking in Chinese Middle School Students

In the context of competency-oriented basic education, art education is gradually shifting from the transmission of artistic knowledge and skills toward the development of students’ comprehensive abilities. The Compulsory Education Art Curriculum Standards (2022 Edition) emphasizes the educational value of art and the cultivation of students’ aesthetic perception, artistic expression, creative practice, and cultural understanding. At the same time, the rapid development of visual culture and digital media has exposed middle school students to increasingly diverse images and information, making their abilities to analyse information, evaluate evidence, form judgements, and reflect on their own thinking increasingly important.Contemporary art, characterized by openness, ambiguity, diverse media, and connections with social issues, provides a particularly suitable context for cultivating these abilities. Unlike appreciation approaches that emphasize predetermined interpretations, contemporary art can create cognitive conflicts and encourage students to ask questions, seek evidence, compare different perspectives, construct arguments, and reconsider their initial judgements. However, the extent to which structured contemporary art appreciation teaching can systematically promote critical thinking among Chinese middle school students remains insufficiently explored.Therefore, this study investigates the impact of contemporary art appreciation teaching on the critical thinking of Grade 8 Chinese middle school students. Two parallel classes, with 30 students in each, are included in a quasi-experimental design. The experimental group receives structured contemporary art appreciation teaching, while the control group receives conventional art appreciation instruction. Students’ critical thinking is examined across five dimensions: question awareness, analytical ability, reasoning ability, evaluative ability, and reflective ability. The teaching process follows the sequence of observation ? questioning ? evidence ? argumentation ? discussion and evaluation ? reflection, with four themes focusing on what can be considered art, how art expresses social issues, whether artworks can have different interpretations, and how contemporary artworks can be evaluated.In addition, Qwen3-8B is introduced as an auxiliary evaluation tool to analyse quantitative scores and classroom discourse. The study aims to examine both the effectiveness and underlying mechanisms of contemporary art appreciation teaching, develop a practical teaching model, and explore the potential and limitations of large language models in educational assessment. (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2022)