Are the Arts Really Good for Anything?

The arts have been one of the first areas to be affected when school boards face severe budget cuts or when they are called upon to improve the results of standardized testing.  After all, there is just so much time in the school day, and something has to be sacrificed.  Too often, the arts are viewed as non-essential luxury programs.  After all, people say, they are not “academic.”

Advocates for the arts argue that the arts are indeed academic.  Skills and content are taught, and grades are awarded for measurable criteria.  The arts bring us joy, and they help us to understand the human experience in ways that are not possible in any other academic discipline.  They encourage creative thinking.  In 2007, in a book called Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Art Education, authors Hetland and Winner reported that they found that high school art classes help students develop a kind of thinking not found in other disciplines.  In the arts, students learn how to engage and persist.  They learn from their mistakes and how to commit and follow through.  But these arguments, while true, tend to be met with polite disregard.

When a Board of Education must find ways to cut spending by hundreds of thousands of dollars or when it must find ways to raise its schools’ performance on federal and state standardized tests, making these arguments is rather like throwing a wet paper towel in front of an on-rushing train locomotive in the hopes that the engine will come to a stop. 

There is one argument, however, that does catch the attention of parents and administrators alike.  Simply, it is arts improve student performance in other academic areas.  The amount of research that supports this statement simply cannot be ignored.  Americans listen to numbers found in hard data.  To say that the arts enhances creative thinking is nice, but to say that involvement in a specific combination of art programs improves reading by a specific number of grade levels speaks volumes to people.  So here goes… almost.

Before mentioning how the arts help in other academic areas, one study must be mentioned.  It continues to crop up in discussions about cognition and the arts, but its popular interpretation is nothing more than pseudoscience at its worst.  In 1993, Frances Rauscher and Gordon Shaw discovered that playing Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major just prior to a math test improved college students’ performance.  The public media grabbed ahold of this report, dubbed it the Mozart Effect, and claimed that playing classical music improved the IQ of children.  33 1/3 LPs (for readers too young to have experienced records, just think CD) containing selections of classical music were sold, and on the covers were pictures of pregnant mothers standing in front of the record player.  The idea was that playing music to a child in utero would produce a baby with a higher IQ.  That Rauscher and Shaw never said anything about IQ, a concept that had been long since discarded in educational circles, or said anything about classical music in general was conveniently ignored.  That the effect on the math test taking ability of the students was found to be short-term was also ignored.  Later, Lawrence Parsons, from the University of Texas, found the rhythm, not the style of music, was the important factor.  He determined that music having 60 beats per minute is ideal for background music.  Music with 40-50 beats per minute calms the brain, while 90 beats per minute is ideal for fast-paced activities.  The point is that we need to be careful about what is written in the public media, and the Mozart Effect is something we do not want to use when discussing the value of the arts.

We have known for some time that a connection exists between learning in the arts and improved performance on the SAT.  Students taking acting or play production score 65 points above the baseline on the SAT.  Students taking music score 61 points above the norm, visual arts score 47 points, and students taking dance score 37 points higher than the norm. 

Paula Tallal, at Rutgers University, found that second graders who had had piano lessons for 6 months and also learned math using computer-assisted games scored at the 4th grade level in fractions, ratios, symmetry, graphs, and other pre-algebra problems. 

In 1998, researchers Calleral, Chapleau, and Iwanga found students from low socioeconomic backgrounds who took music lessons for 8-12 years more than doubled their math test scores, and they improved their history and geography scores by 40% over the control group. 

Rauscher, Shaw, Levine, Wright, Dennis, and Newcomb found that 12 minutes of piano lessons taken twice a week, when combined with singing lessons, for a period of 6 months, produced a 34% improvement in spatial-temporal reasoning scores. 

The U-T San Diego News reported in October, 2012, that 3^rd and 4^th graders whose teachers integrated art into their lessons showed an 87-point average score increase on the California standardized reading test in 2010-2011.  Similarly, a May 2012 report stated that New Jersey found a correlation between schools with more arts programs and greater proficiency scores on the language sections of the state’s High School Proficiency Assessment.

In 2012, a three-year study concluded in Chicago in which 4^th graders who had started with an arts program in 2009 and continued in it through 2011 experienced an 11.5% gain in composite scores on state tests.  Moreover, they scored an average of >11% higher than sixth graders in the same school who had not taken arts. 

As researchers Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner pointed out in a 2009 Greater Good Magazine article (Arts and Smarts: Test Scores and Cognitive Development), accounts of the correlation between taking arts and earning higher scores does not point to causative factors.  Although we are getting closer, brain research has not yet found how the arts affect the brain and lead to better academic performance.  All we have are hypotheses.  Dance students, for example, who must have well developed temporal and spatial reasoning abilities, might be better at pacing and time management on exams like the SAT.  But Hetland and Winner are wrong when they suggest that the students who are involved in the arts are those who are getting good grades anyway.  There have been too many controlled studies in which the control and experimental groups consisted of randomly chosen students.

In 2004, the Dana Foundation undertook a study to determine whether the arts improved cognition or whether it was just smart kids who took art classes.  After three years, the researchers found that training in the arts might be related to improvements in math and reading skills.  In another Dana study, Elizabeth Spelke found children who had intensive music training performed better than the control group in geometry tasks and on map reading. 

Stamford University’s Brian Wandell, found 7-12 year olds who received 1 year of musical training showed greater improvements in reading fluency over the next two-year period. 

No one is saying that the arts make anyone smarter.  Instead, we are forced to acknowledge that involvement in the arts enlarges cognitive capacities.   The numbers are compelling.  A Board of Education would be wise to think twice before cutting the arts program.

[Bill Peltz lectures about the application of brain research in the classroom and talks with parent groups about what brain research teachers us about adolescent behavior.]