The Impact Arts Education Has on Science Scores of School Aged Children
When poet and national endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia gave the 2007 Commencement Address at Stanford University, he used the occasion to deliver an impassioned statement for the value of the arts and arts pedagogy.
"Fine art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world," said Gioia. "There are some truths about life that tin can be expressed only equally stories, or songs, or images. Fine art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions."
© Ronnie Kaufman/Corbis
For years, arts advocates like Gioia take been making similar pleas, stressing the intangible benefits of the arts at a time when many Americans are preoccupied with a market-driven culture of amusement, and schools are consumed with meeting federal standards. Art brings joy, these advocates say, or it evokes our humanity, or, in the words of my x-twelvemonth-old daughter, "It cools kids downward afterwards all the other hard stuff they take to think near."
Bolstering the example for the arts has go increasingly necessary in recent years, as school budget cuts and the movement toward standardized testing have profoundly threatened the function of the arts in schools. Under the No Child Left Behind Human action, passed in 2002, the federal authorities started assessing school districts by their students' scores on reading and mathematics tests.
Equally a result, according to a study by the Middle on Education Policy, school districts across the Us increased the fourth dimension they devoted to tested subjects—reading/linguistic communication arts and math—while cutting spending on non-tested subjects such every bit the visual arts and music. The more than a school fell behind, past NCLB standards, the more than time and money was devoted to those tested subjects, with less going to the arts. The National Didactics Association has reported that the cuts fall hardest on schools with high numbers of minority children.
And the state of affairs is probable to worsen as country budgets get fifty-fifty tighter. Already, in a circular of federal education cuts for 2006 and 2007, arts education nationally was slashed past $35 meg. In 2008, the New York City Department of Didactics's annual study of arts teaching showed that merely eight percent of the metropolis's elementary schools met the state'southward relatively rigorous standards for arts education—and the urban center'due south schools are now facing a $185 1000000 budget cut this year.
For 2009, the nonprofit Center for Budget and Policy Priorities forecasts budget shortfalls in 41 states. California, ranked last amid the states in per capita support for the arts, is because $2 billion of additional cuts to Thousand-12 education. Josef Norris, a grant-supported artist who creates murals with kids in San Francisco's public schools, says he has worked with classes where fifth graders have never picked up a paintbrush or handled a lump of clay.
Given such strong fiscal and political challenges, some arts advocates have felt pressured to eternalize their arguments. Afraid that art won't be able to stand on its own merits, such advocates have sought whatever testify they can find to argue that art contributes to measurable gains in learning—which, in the No Kid Left Behind world, means boosting a school's academic exam scores in literacy and mathematics.
And in fact, advocates have gotten a recent elevator from new inquiry in several scientific fields. For the offset fourth dimension e'er, for instance, scientists accept used sophisticated brain imaging techniques to examine how music, dance, drama, and the visual arts might positively affect cognition and intelligence. Such work, the researchers merits, is a crucial first pace toward understanding whether art tin can actually make people smarter in ways that tin be measured.
But other arts advocates say that'due south the wrong style to go. Skeptical of some claims of the art-boosts-smarts camp, they instead support a line of enquiry that explores the benefits that are unique to the arts. Let art do what fine art can practise best, they say, and let the mathematics course take care of itself. And and then the fence goes on, focused on a question that has long concerned parents, educators, and policy makers akin: What are the arts proficient for?
The Mozart controversy
The focus on art'southward contribution to academics came to wide attention in the 1990s, after researchers from the Academy of California, Irvine, reported in the periodical Nature that college students who listened to 10 minutes of Mozart earlier taking sure parts of an intelligence examination improved their scores—a finding that came to be known as the "Mozart Effect."
© JLP/Jose Luis Pelaez/Zefa/Corbis
Before long, parents who heard virtually the research were playing Mozart to their babies, the governor of Georgia was handing out classical music tapes to parents of newborns, and companies were springing up to package music for parents eager to bolster their children's brain ability.
The Mozart Issue enquiry had some clear limitations: It involved only college-age students, and the improved test scores held up simply for 15 minutes following the musical experience. Afterwards witnessing the strong reaction to their results, the researchers themselves were compelled to write a rejoinder in 1999, pointing out that they had never claimed that "Mozart enhances intelligence."
Still, whether the hard show was there or not, the popular assumption took agree that at that place was a connection. According to a 2006 Gallup poll, 85 percent of Americans believed participation in school music was linked to better grades and college test scores.
After the study on the Mozart Event was published, other researchers tried to substantiate a connection between arts participation and improved cognitive and academic skills. For case, James South. Catterall, a professor at UCLA'southward Graduate School of Education and Data Studies, reported in a 1999 newspaper that middle and loftier schoolhouse students with stiff involvement in theater or music scored an average of xvi to 18 percentage points higher on
standardized tests than those with depression arts interest.
"Information technology's true that students involved in the arts do improve in school and on their SATs than those who are not involved," write researchers Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner of the Harvard Graduate Schoolhouse of Education, in an article that appeared in the Boston Earth in 2007. Notwithstanding, they bespeak out, correlation doesn't add up to causation: It's quite possible that kids involved in the arts are the ones getting skillful grades in the first place.
In a landmark survey called REAP—Reviewing Education and the Arts Project—Hetland and Winner examined the research supporting arts education. Their findings, released in 2000, were controversial. They revealed that in nearly cases there was no demonstrated causal relationship between studying one or more fine art forms and improved cognitive skills in areas beyond the arts.
"We found inconclusive prove that music improves mathematical learning and that trip the light fantastic improves spatial learning," reported the researchers. "Nosotros plant no evidence that studying visual arts, trip the light fantastic toe, or music improves reading."
They continued,
That leaves our most controversial finding. Nosotros amassed no evidence that studying the arts, either every bit separate disciplines or infused into the bookish curriculum, raises grades in academic subjects or improves performance on standardized verbal and mathematics tests. … Our analysis showed that children who studied the arts did no meliorate on accomplishment tests and earned no higher grades than those who did not written report the arts.
Their findings, the researchers said, were greeted with anger. "1 scholar told us that we should never have asked the question, only having washed so, nosotros should accept buried our findings," Hetland and Winner later wrote. "We were shaken." Some critics claimed that their report had shortchanged the effects of art on academics. But the researchers stuck to their conclusions. Furthermore, they cautioned, justifying the arts on the basis of unreliable claims would ultimately exercise more harm than good.
Arts and the brain
In 2004, in an endeavor to sort out the facts, the Dana Foundation, a private philanthropic organization, took on the question: Are smart people fatigued to the arts or does arts preparation make people smarter? Under the leadership of neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga, the Dana Arts and Noesis Consortium assembled neuroscientists and cerebral scientists from seven universities to study whether dance, music, theater, and visual arts might affect other areas of learning—and how.
After more than iii years of research, the results of the $2.1 one thousand thousand project were published in March of 2008 in a report titled "Learning, Arts, and the Encephalon." Several studies in the report suggested that training in the arts might be related to improvements in math or reading skills. In one of these studies, a University of Oregon team, headed by psychologist Michael Posner, observed the brain activity of children 4 to seven years old while they worked on
computerized exercises intended to mimic the attending-focusing qualities of engaging in art. The researchers ended that the arts can train children's attention, which in turn improves cognition.
In another Dana consortium study, Elizabeth Spelke, a neuropsychologist at Harvard Academy, looked at the effects of music training in children and adolescents and found a "clear benefit": Children who had intensive music training did better on some geometry tasks and on map reading. Stanford University psychologist Brian Wandell and colleagues used brain-imaging techniques to study how a certain part of the brain might be influenced by musical activities. He found that students ages 7 to 12 who received more musical training in the first year of the study showed greater improvements in reading fluency over the next 2 years. Wandell reports that phonological awareness—or the ability to distinguish between speech sounds, which is a predictor of early literacy—was correlated with music training and could be tracked with the development of a specific brain pathway.
Overall, the Dana report didn't get then far every bit to prove that arts training straight boosts cognitive and bookish skills; information technology offered no concrete testify that art makes kids smarter. But the project did tighten up the correlations that had been noted before, laying the groundwork for future enquiry into causal explanations. In his introduction to "Learning, Arts, and the Brain," Gazzaniga frames the report as an of import first footstep. "A life-affirming dimension is opening upward in neuroscience," he writes. "To discover how the functioning and appreciation of the arts overstate cerebral capacities volition be a long footstep frontward in learning how better to learn."
Though Gazzaniga and his Dana Consortium colleagues were quite measured in their assessment, many advocates interpreted the report's results as support for their cause. "Arts Education Linked to Amend Brain Activity," read a headline on the website of the Arizona Commission on the Arts after the report was released. A California State PTA newsletter directed parents and teachers to the report, telling them to "find out most the potent links between arts education and cerebral development."
Around the same time in 2008, the advocacy group Americans for the Arts launched a serial of public service announcements aimed at encouraging parents to "feed their children the arts" with images of bowls of "Raisin Brahms" or "Van Goghurt" for breakfast, linked to promises that the arts lead to "increased test scores, better artistic thinking, patience, and determination." Even Barack Obama'south presidential platform, which promised a reinvestment in arts educational activity and professed a wide belief in art'due south value, barbarous back, at to the lowest degree partly, on the academic benefits rationale: "Studies bear witness that arts education raises examination scores."
But many arts researchers and advocates accept reacted strongly against efforts—in research, amongst advancement groups, or in schools—that overemphasize the link between the arts and academic proficiency.
Jessica Hoffmann Davis, a cognitive developmental psychologist and founder of the Arts in Education Programme at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has long been one of these voices. "It is not by arguing that the arts tin practise what other subjects already do (or practice better) that a secure place can exist found for the arts in pedagogy," she writes in her recent book, Why Our Schools Need the Arts. "Nosotros have been so driven to measure out the impact of the arts in education that we began to forget that their strength lies across the measurable."
In an interview, she adds, "No Child Left Behind has sapped the energy and passion out of our classrooms. Information technology'due south a malaise. Standardized testing is leaving everyone behind—teachers and kids—with this heavy preoccupation on what we can mensurate."
Another leading expert on the arts, Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Educational activity, went and so far in an interview as to call it an "American illness" to try to justify the arts in terms of benefits for other disciplines. No one, says Gardner, argues that students should take math considering it will make them perform meliorate in music.
Education of vision
So what are the arts good for?
In 2007, Hetland and Winner published a book, Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Fine art Education, that is then far one of the most rigorous studies of what the arts teach. "Before we can make the case for the importance of arts education, we need to find out what the arts actually teach and what art students really acquire," they write.
Working in loftier school art classes, they found that arts programs teach a specific ready of thinking skills rarely addressed elsewhere in the school curriculum—what they call "studio habits of mind." 1 cardinal habit was "learning to engage and persist," significant that the arts teach students how to larn from mistakes and press ahead, how to commit and follow through. "Students demand to find bug of involvement and work with them securely over sustained periods of fourth dimension," write Hetland and Winner.
The researchers as well plant that the arts help students larn to "envision"—that is, how to recall about that which they tin can't see. That'southward a skill that offers payoffs in other subjects, they note. The ability to envision tin can help a educatee generate a hypothesis in science, for instance, or imagine past events in history class.
Other researchers take identified additional benefits that are particular to the arts. In Why Our Schools Need the Arts, Davis outlines many of these benefits, including the quality of empathy. "Nosotros need the arts because they remind children that their emotions are every bit worthy of respect and expression," she said in an interview. "The arts introduce children to connectivity, date, and allow a sense of identification with, and responsibleness for, others." As a young researcher, Davis once asked adults, children of varying ages, and professional artists to describe emotions such as happiness, sadness, and anger. She found that even very young children could communicate those emotions through drawing. In fact, she observes, "The arts, like no other subject, give children the media and the opportunity to shape and communicate their feelings."
Elliot Eisner, an emeritus professor of fine art and education at Stanford University and a longtime leader in the field, has emphasized the subtle merely important ways the arts can raise thinking—the ability to employ metaphor, for instance, or the role of imagination. "These are outcomes that are useful," says Eisner, "not only in the arts, but in business and other activities where good thinking is employed."
At last year's annual convention for the National Art Educational activity Association, Eisner told the oversupply, "In the arts, imagination is a master virtue. And then it should exist in the didactics of mathematics, in all of the sciences, in history, and indeed, in about all that humans create."
"To help students treat their work every bit a work of fine art is no small accomplishment," he added. "Given this conception, nosotros can ask how much time should be devoted to the arts in school? The respond is clear: all of it."
An "education of vision" is too loftier on Eisner'southward listing of benefits. "You want to help youngsters really run into a tree or urban landscape or an apple tree. It'due south one of the things they can do the rest of their lives."
Such elusive, immeasurable benefits of the arts may, in fact, exist among the nearly valuable. "At this time when we are facing the threat of the reduction of learning to testable right and wrong answers," says Davis, "nosotros might say the most important thing nigh arts learning is that it features ambiguity and respect for the viability of different perspectives and judgments."
Just possibly well-nigh significantly, Davis argues that the arts tin can appoint children who might not otherwise be reached by academics. In fact, an increasing amount of attention is being focused on the benefits of the arts for at-hazard youth.
For case, when a program called the YouthARTS Development Project, a partnership involving the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Justice Department, engaged at-gamble youth in art programs, it plant that the participants showed an increased ability to piece of work with others and finish tasks, and showed better attitudes toward school, fewer court referrals, and improved self-esteem.
"Folks are responding to the deficits in schools by saying, 'Bring in the arts,'" says Davis. "Ironically that's what nosotros've e'er done with private kids, always turned to the arts as a child was near to drib out of school. We accept always known that arts will save the day, just now the day is so bleak that we have a national charge to do what arts practice best—to provide energy and spirit and excitement and customs."
In San Francisco, artist Josef Norris has seen evidence of this claim commencement-hand. When he worked with children to create a mural at an inner-city school, the project was integrated into a unit of measurement on California history and clearing. Every single child in the class had a parent or grandparent who'd been born in another country, says Norris, and each kid made a tile depicting some attribute of his or her family's history.
"Kids who are struggling academically can get hooked," he says. "You live for the moments when the kids shine—when a pathologically shy girl shows upward for mural making on a Saturday forenoon and stays all mean solar day long. Or when a child paints a tile about his family, then brings his grandmother to the unveiling of the mural and says proudly, 'I made that.'"
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Source: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/arts_smarts