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Advocating for Arts Integration in schools (THE MORAL CASE FOR ARTS IN…

- - - - In practice, many schools, beholden to the results of standardized scores in math and reading, have been forced to restructure schedules and resources in order to meet the requirements of these exams.
      - The NCLB indeed placed arts in the definition of its core subjects. In theory, this would allow schools, especially struggling schools, to ask for discretionary federal funding to improve the quality of their arts programs.
      - The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 places an emphasis on measuring the progress metrics in schools through teacher accountability and standardized tests for students.
      - Educators report on the whole that NCLB has engendered less enthusiasm for arts programs as they gear their curricula “for the test.”
      - Most Americans support the increase of the arts in schools by a vast majority, when surveyed. The reality, though, is that a mindshift exists where the arts are ancillary at best and extraneous at worst to the traditional core subjects. Schools do not often integrate an artistic perspective into the learning of these traditional subjects, and are set aside as electives. This perspective increases the chances that an arts program will get cut. On the broader view, creative thinking through the arts is not held to as high esteem is critical thinking on traditional subjects, or the raising of a mathematical mind; our society appears resource scarce in their thinking: that society’s experience of art comes second in order to the traditional measurements of the skills we need to prosper-- an imagined dichotomy that divorces artistic creativity from daily living.
      - An increase in student workloads as a result of NCLB has reportedly led to less time or interest for the arts.
  - - - Strengthening Creative, Cooperative Thinking
        
        Perhaps the most prized sort of expert in todays economy is the engineer, in various engineering disciplines. Engineers are creators by trade. Engineering requires creative thinking and an artistic drive towards innovation. Companies are in need of innovation in order to outthink and out-compete each other. Teaching the fine arts in schools have been shown to improve students in these critical qualities and ready them for the job market.
        
        Increasing the artistic activities of students has been shown to progress them in terms of creative reasoning. One study showed that students who were better exposed to the arts in schools, labeled “arts rich students,” performed better on key creativity tests like the “Torrance” as compared to their “arts poor” peers.
        
        Certain forms of the arts have been shown to increase social skills and social cooperation in students. Participating in collective forms of art such as theater and orchestra foster strong collective thinking, a strengthening of social skills, leadership skills, public speaking skills, and an improvement of the confidence of the in the student as he/she relates to a group. Cooperation among students has been shown to increase as a result of the arts.
        
        Education in the arts has been linked to better organization and working habits among students.
        
        Education in the arts has also been linked to improved visual reasoning and spatial reasoning. Each art form drives student growth in a different way. Theater, for example, has been shown to improve comprehension of narrative and story.
      - Opposition to Transfer
        
        The studies I have researched are quick to note the correlational nature between an increased arts education and better comprehension and scores. These studies do not make causal arguments; most of the time, they suggest that more research should be done to make causal inferences. The researchers note that because of the correlational nature of the arguments, it is difficult to make accurate or convincing policy prescriptions to governments and educators.
        
        proponents of the transfer effect argue that the arts increase the cognitive abilities in students that transfer to other subjects. Opponents argue that the arts may play a role in better grades and performance, but it’s not a directly cognitive effect. Instead, other confounding variables are at play.
        
        A singaporean school, for example, was found to increase nearly all of its academic achievement metrics through a comprehensive introduction of the arts into their curriculum. While it is tempting to make the causal argument that the arts caused the transfer effect into the school’s other subjects, some other causal arguments could confound this. For example, perhaps the arts did not increase the cognitive capabilities of its students but rather the motivational capabilities by raising morale of its students. Students who were enjoying school more decided to spend more after-school time to studying, or even that they were more focused during learning in-school.
        
        Researchers of some of the broader studies which sample larch “arts rich” versus “arts poor” populations note that the family environment, educational quality, and socioeconomic factors surrounding “arts rich” schools could simply make them, regardless of the arts, “better schools” that would otherwise provide a sample of students with higher scores. Schools with better arts programs might, at the same time, have higher quality teachers and a more advanced curriculum due to their locale or their higher funding. The detractors of the “transfer” effect would argue that that these schools which have “arts rich” students at the same time simply have higher performing students.
      - The Transfer Effect
        
        On a more advanced level, the integration of artistic educational paradigms into traditional subjects has been shown to improve grades for the students exposed to them. The studies I’ve researched have tested such integration and found significant improvements on comprehension. Certain subjects are linked to the integration of certain art forms-- dance, for example, and perhaps unintuitively, has been found to integrate into the understanding of mathematics. The performance of certain difficult texts, such as an exposure to the theater of the works of Shakespeare, has been shown to increase comprehension of the text. Drama, through its play of story and narrative, has been shown to increase verbal comprehension. The 62-study compendium often links certain forms of art to unintuitive “transfer effect” consequences; in my view, it is often the way that these art forms are linked up to teaching certain concepts--the specific projects that teachers to introduce arts into a traditional subject.
        
        The 62 study compilation by the NASAA details, for each specific form of the fine arts--theater, visual arts, film, music in its various forms, storytelling, drawing & painting, and dance--the performance-based consequences of these artistic modalities on the performance of students in subjects not pertaining to the arts.
        
        A participation in music, for example, has been widely thought to improve comprehension and ultimately the test scores in mathematics. Proponents point to studies linking the listening of Mozart and other complex pieces of music to increased performance on tests and intelligence tasks. This hypothesis has borne out in the results of several studies, including the effects on teaching music to children on test scores, the effects of participation in school orchestra on standardized math exams, and the integration of musical projects on the comprehension of math subjects on improved spacial and mathematical reasoning. Music theory taught in schools, for example, has been shown to improve thinking about fractions as well as advanced algebraic thinking.
        
        A compendium of studies compiled by the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA) chronicles 62 studies in which the arts were found to result in a specific increase in cognitive function for the student. Among the effects found for arts programs that improved certain kinds of creative cognition, a body of work has been collected to argue for a “transfer” effect that exists in which education in the arts “transfers” to improvements in other disciplines. This effect has been explored in the strong correlational data between certain specific kinds of arts and their proposed transferred effects on other disciplines, and on the overall transfer effects of a greater exposure to the arts and improved SAT scores.
        
        A far-reaching study of over 25,000 students has shown that students associated with a higher degree of arts exposure, whether it be in school-or extracurricularly, perform definitely better on in-school and standardized tests. The correlation between exposure to an arts education and higher academic performance has been studied widely.
      - Effect On Lower Income Schools
        
        s0me improvements have been made in the arts education of low-funded schools. Part of this is due to the NCLB act. Although low-performance schools are especially pressured to “teach to the test,”funding and grants for arts programs for these schools are also more accessible. The available research for the improvements made by arts programs to low-funded schools is compelling on multiple fronts, including indeed the “transfer” effect but also the raising of school retention, student behavior, and the overall habitability of schools.
        
        critical studies have been conducted at low-funded schools to find that the introduction of arts programs like a school orchestra boots mathematics scores, and that an overall injection of arts exposure betters the living environment of schools in rough conditions, raises motivation, and improves scores
        
        going against the detractors are the benefits of an arts integrated education on underperforming or low-income schools. A study found that not only did the “arts rich” versus “arts poor” academic improvement effect occur at the higher quartile of arts exposure, but that a sub-study of the lower quartile suggested the same positive correlation.