When asked to rank whether they disagree or agree with certain statements, at least 76 percent of respondents from each country surveyed—the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, and Japan—said they believe that creativity is key to driving economic growth.
STEMtoSTEAM.org links to a May 2011 President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities report, “Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America’s Future Through Creative Schools.” Based on 18 months of study, the report reviews the current state of arts education and includes a set of recommendations for federal, state, and local policy makers.
The report touches on neuroscience and how arts education affects the brain’s abilities and cognitive development. Findings include:
- Music training is closely related to phonological awareness—one of the most important predictors of early reading skills.
- Children who practiced a specific art form developed improved attention skills and improved general intelligence. Training their attention and focus also leads to improvement in other cognitive domains.
- Arts integration techniques, which use multiple senses to repeat information, cause more information to be stored in long-term—as opposed to short-term—memory, and may actually change the structure of the neurons.
In 2010, Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools compared three arts integration-focused schools (AIMS) to three control schools over a three-year period.
The AIMS schools with the most minority and low-income students closed the reading gap by 14 percentage points and the math gap by 26 percentage points over a three-year period. In the control schools, the number of proficient students actually went down 4.5 percent.
Researchers also followed classroom teachers as they learned how to integrate the arts into their instruction. A large majority of those teachers (79 percent) said they “totally changed their teaching,” and 94 percent said that they developed “additional ways of teaching critical thinking skills.”
The report makes five recommendations:
- Build robust collaborations among different approaches to arts education.
- Develop the field of arts integration.
- Expand in-school opportunities for teaching artists.
- Utilize federal and state policies to reinforce the place of arts in K-12 education.
- Widen the focus of evidence gathering about arts education.
Many STEM-to-STEAM supporters note that arts education must be integrated into STEM teaching if today’s students are to succeed in workplaces that demand creative thinking, unique approaches to challenges, and artistic points of view.
ArtsEdge, from the Kennedy Center, offers resources for educators to integrate arts into their classroom instruction. The site features lessons, activities, and projects, along with multimedia such as games, audio and video clips, printables, and graphics.
Themes that help students connect arts to other education topics include acoustics and sound; earth, wind, and water; the Civil War; and plants and seasons.
For instance, a lesson on acoustics and sound teaches students about how the Fibonacci sequence relates to math concepts of pattern and music structure. Another lesson about weather and wind introduces students to the properties of air masses and unequal heating of the Earth as the force behind wind. Students create a dance to demonstrate that they understand weather patterns.
The Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts and the Northrop Grumman Foundation partnered on a national Early Childhood STEM Learning Through the Arts initiative for preschool and kindergarten students, teachers, parents, and caregivers at 10 locations around the country. The initiative began in 2010 through a four-year, $1.15 million U.S. Department of Education grant.
“We believe our work could make a substantial difference in how teachers teach and how children learn,” said Terrence Jones, president and CEO of the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, when the program first launched. “The high level of research involved in this program will allow us to prove the arts should be integral to STEM education for young children.”
The program uses performing-arts elements in school curriculum to teach STEM concepts and skills to children ages 3-5. It includes multi-session classroom residencies; professional development workshops for administrators, teachers, and specialists; and family involvement workshops for parents and caregivers.
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