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The Daily Signal
These Studies
Found Exposure to the Arts Boosted Educational Success
Brittany Corona
October 27, 2014
New research into humanities education suggests student learning
outcomes increase with exposure to the arts.
Few empirical studies have been conducted on the benefits of arts
education for students. Jay Greene, endowed chair of the Department of
Education at the University of Arkansas, and his team have released two
studies on the educational benefits of engagement with the arts.
Last year, Greene, along with researchers Brian Kisida and Daniel
Bowen, conducted the first large-scale study of field trips to
understand the impact of cultural enrichment through the arts on
students’ learning outcomes.
In “The Educational Value of Field Trips,” Greene and his team applied
“gold standard” methodology to measure the educational value associated
with students who toured an art museum during a field trip. They found
that students who attended the tour could recall historical and
sociological information about particular works of art at higher rates
than students who did not visit the museum.
For example, 88 percent of the students who saw civil-war era painter
Eastman Johnson’s work, At the Camp— Spinning Yarns and Whittling,
remembered the cultural context of the painting as depicting
“abolitionists making maple syrup to undermine the sugar industry,
which relied on slave labor.” According to the report, the students’
high rate of recall compared to that of students who did not attend a
museum suggests that art could be used to increase the learning
capacity of students for traditional classroom content.
They also found students who attended the field trip experienced a
large gain in critical-thinking skills, which was observed in their
essays regarding particular works of art. Students who attended the
museum also showed higher measures of historical empathy, tolerance and
a desire to visit more art museums than students who did not tour the
museum.
Their findings underscore the value of cultural field trips, which have
a long history in American education (although they have been on the
decline in recent years, or replaced with non-cultural field trips,
such as outings to amusement parks):
Schools gladly endured the expense and disruption of providing field
trips because they saw these experiences as central to their
educational mission: [S]chools exist not only to provide economically
useful skills in numeracy and literacy, but also to produce civilized
young men and women who would appreciate the arts and culture.
More-advantaged families may take their children to these cultural
institutions outside of school hours, but less-advantaged students are
less likely to have these experiences if schools do not provide them.
With field trips, public schools viewed themselves as the great
equalizer in terms of access to our cultural heritage.
Students from rural or high-poverty areas had the largest gains in
historical recall of information and critical thinking and reported
higher levels of empathy, tolerance and desire to return to the museum.
Greene found similar results in his newest study, “Learning from Live
Theater.”
Using the same research design, Greene, with coauthors Collin Hitt,
Anne Kraybill and Cari Bogulski, assessed a group of students’
knowledge about theater—and interest in watching or participating in
theater—after attending a live performance. The researchers used a
sample of students who applied for, and won, tickets to either A
Christmas Carol or Hamlet, compared to a control group who lost the
lottery.
The study showed students who saw live theater significantly improved
their knowledge of the plot and vocabulary related to the play by 63
percent of a standard deviation. The students also showed significantly
higher degrees of tolerance and empathy through the “Reading the Mind
through the Eyes” test than the control group. The researchers used the
RMET measure because it tracks feelings of empathy, and prior research
has found that reading literature or engaging in theater enhances one’s
ability to read emotions.
Both studies suggest that culturally enriching experiences produce
important educational benefits, which in turn could contribute to
overall student achievement. Greene’s findings come at a time of
concentrated focus on STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering,
Mathematics—education.
In 2009, the Obama administration published its “Educate to Innovate”
campaign, which included $260 million in partnerships involving the
federal government and industry to prepare more than 100,000 new STEM
teachers over the next decade But at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival, The
Atlantic asked thought leaders in academia (Harvard, Yale, and
Cal-Berkley) and the private sector, what letter— if any— should be
added to STEM education. They all agreed that they would add the letter
“A” for the arts and humanities.
“To me, mathematics, computer science and the arts are insanely
related,” said Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity and Founder of GoogleX.
“They’re all creative expressions.”
“[Arts and humanities] seem to me such an important dimension of
educating students about what science, technology, engineering and math
are for,” said Harvard President Drew Gilpin.
Greene’s studies and advocates of STEAM both suggest the arts could
enhance learning in reading, math and the hard sciences. Student
engagement of the arts, through field trips and live performances, also
provides positive reinforcement for cultural institutions within
communities to contribute to students’ overall education. As the
authors concluded, “Schools produce important educational outcomes
other than those captured by math and reading test scores, and it is
possible for researchers to collect measures of those other outcomes.
If what’s measured is what matters, then we need to measure more
outcomes to expand the definition of what matters in education.”
Read this and other articles with links at The Daily Signal
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