Lois Hetland

The Arts and Academic Achievement: What the Evidence Shows

Editor’s @ore: Below is the Executive Summrrn of the Reviewing Education and the Arts Project (REAP) Report: The Art.

Art for Our Sake School Arts Classes Matter More than Ever-But Not for the Reasons You Think.

and Academic Achievement: What the Evidence Shows. The authors wish to (it Anowledge Ralph Smith, of the Universiti~ of Illinois, for his excellent editoriirl guidunce. The full report is published t is u special issue of the Journal of Atwhetic Education 34, no. 3/4 (FalWiti p r 2000).

Teaching Cognitive Skill through Dance: Evidence for Near but Not Far Transfer

Editors note. Reprinted with permission from the authors. Previously featured in The Boston Globe, September 2, 2007.hy do we teach the arts in schools? In an educational system strapped for money and increasingly ruled by standardized tests, arts courses can seem almost a needless extravagance, and the arts are being cut back at schools across the country. One justification for keeping the arts has now become almost a mantra for par-ents, arts teachers, and even politicians: arts make you smarter. The notion that arts classes improve children’s scores on the SAT, the MCAS, and other tests is practically gospel among arts-advocacy groups. A Gallup poll last year found that 80 percent of Americans believed that learning a musical instrument would improve math and science skills. But that claim turns out to be unfound-ed. It’s true that students involved in the arts do better in school and on their SATs than those who are not involved. However, correlation isn’t causation, and an analysis we did several years ago showed no evidence that arts training actually causes scores to rise. There is, however, a very good rea-son to teach arts in schools, and it’s not the one that arts supporters tend to fall back on. In a recent study of several art classes in Boston-area schools, we found that arts programs teach a specific set of thinking skills rarely addressed elsewhere in the curriculum–and that far from being irrelevant in a test-driven education system, arts educa-tion is becoming even more important as standardized tests like the MCAS exert a narrowing influence over what schools teach. The implications are broad, not just for schools but for society. As schools cut time for the arts, they may be losing their ability to produce not just the artis-tic creators of the future, but innovative leaders who improve the world they inherit. And by continuing to focus on the arts’ dubious links to improved test scores, arts advocates are losing their most powerful weapon: a real grasp of what arts bring to education. It is well established that intelligence and thinking ability are far more com-plex than what we choose to measure on standardized tests. The high-stakes exams we use in our schools, almost exclusively focused on verbal and quan-titative skills, reward children who have a knack for language and math and who can absorb and regurgitate information. They reveal little about a student’s intel-lectual depth or desire to learn, and are poor predictors of eventual success and satisfaction in life. As schools increasingly shape their classes to produce high test scores, many life skills not measured by tests just don’t get taught. It seems plausible to imagine that art classes might help fill the gap by encouraging different kinds of thinking, but there has been remarkably little careful study of what skills and modes of thinking the arts actually teach. To determine what happens inside arts classes, we spent an academic year studying five visual-arts classrooms in two local Boston-area schools, video-taping and photographing classes, ana-lyzing what we saw, and interviewing teachers and their students. What we found in our analysis should worry parents and teachers facing cut-backs in school arts programs. While students in art classes learn techniques specific to art, such as how to draw, how to mix paint, or how to center a pot, they’re also taught a remarkable array of mental habits not emphasized elsewhere in school. Such skills include visual-spatial abilities, reflection, self-criticism, and the willingness to experiment and learn from mistakes. All are important to numerous careers, but are widely ignored by today’s standardized tests. In our study, funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust, we worked with classes at the Boston Arts Academy, a pub-

Beyond the Evidence Given: A Critical Commentary on Critical Links

Can the study of dance lead to enhanced academic skills? Dance is an art form that makes use of a wide variety of cognitive skills and may call upon many of the intelligences identified by Howard Gardner in his theory of multiple intelligences.1 Clearly dance involves nonverbal spatial and musical intelligence. Dance also may call upon linguistic intelligence, when students learn the verbal vocabulary of dance or when they discuss and evaluate a dance sequence. Because dancers typically work as a group, a dance program may teach skills in interpersonal intelligence. And because dancers are taught to express their feelings through movement, dance may help people become more aware of themselves and hence may help to develop intrapersonal intelligence. Dance programs may also help children to focus and work hard, and children who engage in dance may actually gain more energy for their academic work. Dance, thus, engages students in many ways, and it is conceivable that because of its multifaceted nature, dance, when well taught, can lead to cognitive outcomes in other areas besides the learning of dance. And indeed, dance educators have sometimes made such a claim.2 In what follows, we report the results of two very small meta-analyses testing the claims that dance instruction leads to improvements in reading and improvements in nonverbal reasoning. General Method

A Ship with Two Prows: Evaluating Professional Development for Contemporary Art Educators

n wIiLi1 sense are the links summarim1 in C’ri/ic,n/ Links: Lerrvriing in rhtz 11 1’1,s trnd Student Aiutlwiic m d So( ,ill/ Dc~i~rlopnzr~tit actually “criticiil” ’ Art. they critical in the scientific sen\&; o f that word, meaning “characterizc‘tl hy careful and exact evaluation and ~jutlptiient“’! Or “critical” meaning “essentiai. hu t in short supply“’?’ In ~ h ; i i I’ollows. we compare some of the swc‘cping claims that some of the voluinc‘. cas;ys make with the more nuanced ~.ummaries of the actual studies on whiclil those claims are based. The claims pi beyond the evidence summarized i i i (’ri/ku/ Links. We urge the reader 10 examine carefully the results describe i n each study summary. along with the I , ommentary provided. In those two seci 1,)ns readers can usually learn about I ~ C . limitations of each study. We intend ~ I , I criticism of the studies by pointing out that they have limitaticins--.-all studies. even the most rigorous, limited. Our concern is that interprcliic claims have been made about tht. studies that ignore important Iiniitatioii\. As a result, casual readers may conic to believe that a small dose of the arts I-, d l that is needed to improve students‘ thinking skills, social skills, school 1-1; tention. and academic selfconce[)i. \uch a conclusion is simply not scicni I tically based. The pi’‘ ililems begin in the introductory essay by Richard Deasy (iii-iv). We read that the essayists “agree that the Compendium studies suggest that wellcrafted arts experiences produce positive academic and social effects” (iii). The reader should note that a causal claim is being made here-the claim that studying the arts causes academic and social skills to improve. But a carefu l reading shows that many of the studies neither claim nor support a causal relationship. as we discuss below. In the bookend to Deasy’s opening, the volume‘s concluding essay, entitled “The Arts and the Transfer of Learning,” James Catterall states that the studies chosen for this compendium met strict criteria for “their ability to make causal suggestions” ( 154). Respectfully, we must disagree. Both of us participated in the crcatjon of the Criticd Links by selecting and summarizing the dance, visual arts, music. and multi-arts studies. We included all studies that we believed were well-enough designed to shed light on the relationship between arts learning. on the one hand, and academic and/or social learning, on the other. But some of the studies selected were well-designed mid purely correlational. A correlation between some form of study (here, the arts) and some kind of outcome (here, social or cognitive) offers no intormation about causality. Of course, two factors that are correlated may be related causally. though we cannot know whether or how: A may cause B (arts study may enhance skills); B may cause A (that is, students with strong skills may choose LO study the arts). But two correlated factors may also be causally unrelated, since a third factor may cause both. For example, parents may push their children to work hard in academic classes and to study the arts, or schools with good arts programs may also have good academic programs, leading to students excelling in both. The closing essay goes on to state that the studies “all” show evidence or transfer (154). Let us take a close look at the claims laid out in Catterall’s figure 1 ( 1 52-53) and then look hack at the studies summarized. Causal connections have indeed been demonstrated in some areas; music enhances certain kinds of spatial reasoning but not others; and classroom drama enhances an array of verbal abilities. Our concerns are with the claims made for the transfer effects of exposure to visual arts, dance, and multi-arts programs.

Learning To Make Music Enhances Spatial Reasoning.

This chapter describes a multi-methods evaluation using dialogue, survey data, and video documentation. In 2009, Art21 Educators, a professional development program for Art21, an organization producing a video series on contemporary art, invited art teachers to a summer institute in New York City. During the following year, teachers built a professional community through distance learning webinars and shared content on an asynchronous social networking platform. More systematic evaluation began in year 2 to address multiple needs: supporting program development and co-developing longitudinal surveys about participant outcomes. Early on, the evaluation seemed in conflict with itself. Ultimately, all stakeholders learned from the evolving approaches, leading to a theory of change about professional development that emerged from the process.