Why Arts Education Matters

By Dr. Len Henriksson

University of British Columbia Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration

Presentation notes from the B.C. School Trustees Association 1998 Annual General Meeting

Introduction

Most people probably run for School Trustee out of a conviction that they can effect some positive change in their district and "improve performance". All of you are about halfway through your term, and I'll bet you've had a few surprises. Among them, you have probably found that there are many, many ways to define school performance in addition to the ones you were thinking about when you filed your nomination papers.

Today, a very heavy emphasis is placed upon examination results as a measure of school or District performance. Some of you may have seen the recent series of articles in the Province in which exam scores played a deciding role in ranking schools from first to last. Although we'll always care about exam results, it is very easy to confuse them with outcomes of education, such as college/university admission, lifetime employment, life-satisfaction, personal attitudes, and a host of others. By the end of our presentation, we hope that you will be able to describe why healthy arts programs are an important way to promote improved academic performance and other valuable outcomes for the students in your district.

Multiple intelligences and arts education

Not long ago, children wrote "readiness tests" before they entered school. Very roughly, the idea was that you could identify "IQ" fairly easily, and once you did that, children could be grouped accordingly. We tended to look at intelligence as "one big lump", and something we were either born with or not born with. We also tended to assume that tests (typically written ones) could be used to tell how smart we were. Recent research by Harvard University's Howard Gardner and others is challenging this view. Increasingly, it is becoming apparent that we all have as many as eight "intelligences":

Linguistic intelligence is the capacity to use language, your native language, and perhaps other languages, to express what's on your mind and to understand other people. Poets really specialize in linguistic intelligence, but any kind of writer, orator, speaker, lawyer, or person for whom language is an important stock in trade highlights linguistic intelligence.

People with a highly-developed logical-mathematical intelligence understand the underlying principles of some kind of a causal system, the way a scientist or a logician does, or can manipulate numbers, quantities and operations the way a mathematician does...

Spatial intelligence refers to the ability to represent the spatial world internally in your mind - the way a sailor or airplane pilot navigates the large spatial world, or the way a chess player or sculptor represents a more circumscribed spatial world. Spatial intelligence can be used in the arts or in the sciences...

Bodily kinesthetic intelligence is the capacity to use your whole body or parts of your body - your hand, your fingers, your arms - to solve a problem, make something, or put on some kind of a production. The most evident examples are people in athletics or the performing arts, particularly dance or acting...

Musical intelligence is the capacity to think in music, to be able to hear patterns, recognize them, remember them, and perhaps manipulate them...

Interpersonal intelligence is understanding other people. It's an ability we all need, but is at a premium if you are a teacher, clinician, salesperson, or politician.

Intrapersonal intelligence refers to having an understanding of yourself, of knowing who you are, what you can do, what you want to do, how you react to things, what things to avoid, and what things to gravitate toward...

Naturalist intelligence designates the human ability to discriminate among living things (plants, animals) as well as sensitivity to other features of the natural world.

As Gardner notes, one of the many questions that we can ask after we've pondered a categorization like this one is, "what are the things people do in the world?". What does it take to be a politician, a plumber, an artist, a surgeon, a homemaker or an airline passenger agent? Presumably, a different "mix" of intelligences is optimal for each of these job titles. It follows that at school, there should be a variety of opportunities to develop the various kinds of intelligence, rather than a lopsided emphasis on a small subset of them.

There is a growing body of research that suggests that when arts are developed and included as part of the core curricula, students have more and better chances of achieving their greatest potential. "The arts are a major area of human cognition, one of the ways in which we know about the world and express our knowledge," Gardner writes. "To withhold artistic means of understanding is as much malpractice as to withhold mathematics."

Some researchers believe that learning consists of the growth of neural connections in the brain. As one author wrote, "it is as if a trail is blazed with the first use of the pathway and each passage along the way wears the trail deeper and deeper. Eventually, the action triggered by the electrical impulse becomes automatic." In early childhood, these connections are made at a phenomenal rate, and there is a clear opportunity for educators to encourage growth of connections for particular attributes such as language development and any number of others.

Scientists at the University of California at Irvine have found that music instruction can improve a child's spatial reasoning, which is essential to success in math, the sciences and engineering. Children were tested before and after eight months of voice or piano lessons. The spatial reasoning improved by about thirty-five per cent for these students. A control group of students (who received no music instruction at all) showed very little improvement.

Lessons from experience

When you look at what has happened at the K-12 level, it's pretty easy to see that there has been a paradigm shift throughout education. Let me briefly describe what I mean. We know that learning requires the active participation of every student. Whether you're teaching high-schoolers or executives in a continuing-education setting, studies tell us fairly regularly that the students remember as little as 10% of what they hear (or 25% of what they see), but as much as 90% of what they actually do.

Learning is both an individual and group process; people also learn in a variety of ways, and at different rates. Meanwhile, surveys by organizations such as the B.C. Business Council indicate that employers are looking for teamwork and communications skills in the graduates that they hire. Outcomes such as improved teamwork skills can be associated with arts programs. Of course, students have many opportunities (in and out of school) to achieve these outcomes; my point is simply to remind you that they are important.

The Catterall study

One recent study was done by UCLA Professor James Catterall. The purpose of his work was to describe the relationship between student involvement in the arts and academic achievement using a sample of about 25,000 students from a diverse sample of 1,000 schools across the United States.

Briefly, the study contains three analyses. In the first, Catterall compares the highest and lowest arts-involved quartiles of Grade 8 students. He found that nearly 80% of high-arts youth reported "mostly A's or B's in English", in contrast to about 64% of low-arts youth. About two-thirds of high-arts students scored in the top half of standardized test performance, versus only about 43% of the low arts group. Only about 1.4% of students with high-arts involvement dropped out over the subsequent two years of school.

The dropout rate was four times higher for low-arts students. In Catterall's second analysis, he looked at Grade 10 students. Essentially, he again found that performance in academic subjects for the high-arts group tended to be higher. The specific outcomes he examined included: verbal and math skills, reading performance, and tests of history, citizenship and geography. Additionally, high arts students were significantly more likely to perform community service.

As the author notes, "it does not take extensive experience... to realize that involvement in the arts is neither the only nor the most important difference between the groups he compared (p. 8)." We know that there could be many other important differences. One very crucial one is that children from more educated and affluent households are more likely to be involved with the arts.

Because of this, Catterall conducted a third analysis which included only the poorest 6,500 students of the study sample. He then compared the high-arts against the low-arts group. As one might expect, he found that the overall performance levels were lower. However, he still found that the advantages for arts-involved students were still very pronounced, particularly at the Grade 10 levels.

Conclusions

Although a great deal remains to be learned, we think that the findings of studies such as the ones I've discussed are very encouraging. They speak for quality arts programs in every B.C. school district.

For some of you, arts are an integral part of life. When the arts are not a part of your life (perhaps because you prefer to attend meetings several nights each week), it is sometimes hard to know what the arts can contribute to your life, or to the lives of others.

In any case, as School Trustees, I know that you're all working hard to spend each dollar as wisely as you can. What I hope we've accomplished here is simply to make a case for the importance of arts education and its outcomes as you engage in your deliberations. Thanks for your time.