Contextual and cultural influences on preschoolers' aesthetic experience: evidence from a situational teaching intervention in China.

INTRODUCTION: Contextual and cultural influences play an important role in shaping young children's learning, meaning-making, and emotional engagement. In early childhood education, art appreciation provides a valuable context for examining how children perceive, interpret, and emotionally respond to culturally and pedagogically structured learning environments. However, empirical evidence remains limited regarding how culturally grounded contextual teaching approaches influence preschoolers' aesthetic experience. Drawing on situated learning theory and Li Jilin's situational teaching framework in China, this study examined the effects of a situational teaching intervention on preschoolers' aesthetic experience in art appreciation. METHODS: A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design was adopted. Sixty preschool children from two intact classes in a public kindergarten in Beijing, China, participated in the study. One class was assigned to the experimental group, and the other served as the control group. Over an eight-week period, the experimental group participated in situational art appreciation activities organized around life-related scenarios, storytelling, role-play, multisensory exploration, and reflective dialogue, whereas the control group received conventional art appreciation instruction. Children's aesthetic experience was assessed across three dimensions: aesthetic perception, aesthetic understanding, and aesthetic emotion. RESULTS: Repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed Group × Time interactions for visual perception and verbal expression, F(1, 58) = 8.12, p = 0.01, ηp 2 = 0.12; aesthetic understanding, F(1, 58) = 9.32, p < 0.001, ηp 2 = 0.14; facial expression, F(1, 58) = 5.14, p = 0.03, ηp 2 = 0.08; and preference explanation, F(1, 58) = 4.78, p = 0.03, ηp 2 = 0.08. No significant Group × Time interaction was found for viewing duration, F(1, 58) = 0.54, p = 0.46, ηp 2 = 0.01. After Bonferroni correction, robust intervention effects remained for visual perception and verbal expression and aesthetic understanding, while effects on aesthetic emotion were suggestive and should be interpreted with caution. DISCUSSION: The results suggest that culturally grounded situational teaching can support preschoolers' aesthetic-cognitive and socio-emotional engagement by embedding artworks within meaningful, interactive, and emotionally resonant learning contexts. This study provides educational psychological evidence for the role of contextualized teaching in promoting young children's perception, meaning-making, and emotional expression. It also extends research on contextual and cultural influences by showing how a Chinese situational teaching model may function as a developmentally appropriate contextual learning approach in early childhood art education.