The authors examine SAT data from the College Board in order to examine the correlation between the number of years of art education and SAT scores. By studying twelve years of data, they find that studying art is associated with higher SAT scores, and that students who take four years of art courses have higher scores than those who take some art but less than four years' worth.
The authors seek to investigate whether studying the arts makes people more creative, and by extension, whether studying the arts builds creative thinking skills that can be deployed outside the arts. They do so through a series of meta-analyses examining existing literature, and find that the presence of an association between studying the arts and creative thinking depends on experimental design and the form of creativity measured.
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Erik MogaKristin BurgerLois HetlandEllen Winner
This article aims to discover evidence for the "Mozart Effect"--the observation that listening to music for brief periods temporarily enhances performance on spatial tasks.
The author reviews the empirical literature testing that there is an association between instruction in music (usually school-based) and performance in reading (as measured by reading test scores or by general tests of verbal aptitude).
ABSTRACT The article discusses the research which has showed that music education enhances spatial reasoning skills. The result has suggested that the various kinds of musical instruction leads to spatial learning and the type of instruction has not been limited to any particular program component, musical style or instructional practice. The study has demonstrated that learning standard notation promotes the facilitation of the performance in the spatial-temporal tasks. The music instruction has contributed to the improvement of at least one type of spatial skill in which it is projected to
The article discusses the research which showed that the usage of drama in the classroom by the educators can promote a deeper learning in the variety of verbal fields. Drama has been considered as an effective tool to improve the accomplishment in story understanding, reading achievement, reading preparedness and writing. The result has demonstrated that the drama helps the children to master the texts they enact and to practice the new materials that are not yet enacted. The study has showed that drama instruction can serve as a creative and effective instrument for learning that exceeds
STEM learning ecosystems harness unique contributions of educators, policymakers, families, and others in symbiosis toward a comprehensive vision of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education for all children. This paper describes the attributes and strategies of 15 leading ecosystem efforts throughout the country with the hope that others may use their lessons to deepen rich STEM learning for many more of America’s children.
Can reading skills be enhanced by instruction in the visual arts? Arts education researchers have sometimes made this claim and have argued that the visual arts can play a strong role in the teaching of basic skills in the kindergarten and elementary school years. There are two possible mechanisms by which visual arts instruction might enhance reading ability, one cognitive, one motivational. The cognitive mechanism would involve transfer of skill. Perhaps visual arts training strengthens visual perception skills that can be deployed in reading.
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Kristin BurgerEllen WinnerUniversity of Illinois
Progress in understanding cognitive developmental change mechanisms requires methods that yield detailed data about particular changes. The microgenetic method is an approach that can yield such data. It involves (a) observations of individual children throughout the period of the change, (b) a high density of observations relative to the rate of change within that period, and (c) intensive trial-by-trial analyses intended to infer the processes that gave rise to the change. This approach can illuminate both qualitative and quantitative aspects of change, indicate the conditions under which
Suitable for planners, educationalists and environmentalists, this book introduces the theory and the practice of children's participation, and its importance for developing democracy and sustainable communities.
In the midst of discussions about improving education, teacher education, equity, and diversity, little has been done to make pedagogy a central area of investigation. This article attempts to challenge notions about the intersection of culture and teaching that rely solely on microanalytic or macroanalytic perspectives. Rather, the article attempts to build on the work done in both of these areas and proposes a culturally relevant theory of education. By raising questions about the location of the researcher in pedagogical research, the article attempts to explicate the theoretical framework