PictureDigital Fingerprint Art
  • Arts Education
  • From Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development
Published by the Arts Education Program (AEP)
Critical Links and other research studies point to strong relationships between learning in the arts and fundamental cognitive skills and capacities used in mastering other school subjects, including reading, writing and mathematics.

Reading and Language Development
  • Certain forms of arts instruction enhance and complement basic reading instruction aimed at helping children "break the phonetic code" that unlocks written language by associating letters, words, and phrases with sounds, sentences and meanings.
  • Young children who engage in dramatic enactments of stories and text improve their reading comprehension, story understanding and ability to read new 
    materials they have not seen before.
  • Arts learning experience develop expression and reflective skills that enhance writing proficiency. 
Mathematics
  • Music instruction develops spatial reasoning skills, which are fundamental to understanding and using mathematical ideas and concepts. 
Picture
5th Grade Eco Art
 PictureDigital Fingerprint Art - Forensics Science Unit
Effective Social Behavior
  • Studies of student learning experiences in drama, music, dance and multi-arts activities show student growth in self-confidence, self-control, self-identity, conflict resolution, collaboration, empathy and social tolerance.            
Motivation to Learn
  • Motivation and the attitudes and dispositions to pursue and sustain learning are essential to achievement. Learning in the arts nurtures these capacities, including active engagement, disciplined and sustained attention, persistence, and healthy risk-taking, and increases attendance and educational aspirations.  
Environment
  • It is critical that a learning environment provides a positive context for learning. Students in this compendium show that the arts help to create the kind of learning environment that is conducive to teacher and student success by fostering teacher innovation, a positive professional culture, community engagement, increased student attendance and retention, effective instructional practice and school identity.
Fundamental Cognitive Skills and Capacities
  • Learning in individual art forms as well as in multi-arts experiences engages and strengthens such fundamental cognitive capacities as spatial reasoning (the capacity for organizing and sequencing ideas); conditional reasoning (theorizing about outcomes and consequences); problem solving; and the components of creative thinking (originality, elab
    oration, flexibility).
Additional Reading About the Importance of Arts Education...
"Book Tackles Old Debate: Role of Art in School" http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/arts/design/04stud.html
"Art for Our Sake" http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/09/02/art_for_our_sake/?page=full    
"Why Arts Education Is Crucial, and Whose Doing It Best" http://www.edutopia.org/arts-music-curriculum-child-development