Get Smart Through Art

We all suspected that arts in elementary school had value beyond what we could see, but now there is actual data that supports that supposition.  The synopsis of this study ran in the New York Times a couple weeks ago, and I hope it gets wide attention.

Researchers had a rare opportunity to explore the relationship between art and social and educational values  when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville, Ark in 2011. Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, they were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes.  Students who, by lottery, were selected to visit the museum on a field trip demonstrated stronger critical thinking skills, displayed higher levels of social tolerance, exhibited greater historical empathy and developed a taste for art museums and cultural institutions.

Crystal Bridges was founded by Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton. It has a 50,000 square feet of gallery space and an endowment of more than $800 million.  Thanks to a generous private gift, the museum has a program that allows school groups to visit at no cost to students or schools.

Before the opening, researchers contacted the museum’s education department. The demand for school visits to the museum far exceeded available slots, so they partnered with the museum and conducted a lottery to fill the available slots.

Over the course of the following year, nearly 11,000 students and almost 500 teachers participated in our study, roughly half of whom had been selected by lottery to visit the museum. Applicant groups who won the lottery constituted our treatment group, while those who did not win an immediate tour served as our control group.  Several weeks after the students in the treatment group visited the museum, they administered surveys to all of the students. The surveys included multiple items that assessed knowledge about art, as well as measures of tolerance, historical empathy and sustained interest in visiting art museums and other cultural institutions as well as an essay.

Further, the researchers directly measured whether students were likely to return to Crystal Bridges as a result of going on a school tour. Students who participated in the study were given a coupon that gave them and their families free entry to a special exhibit at the museum. The coupons were coded so that we could determine the group to which students belonged. Students in the treatment group were 18 percent more likely to attend the exhibit than students in the control group.  Importantly, most of the benefits observed were significantly larger for minority students, low-income students and students from rural schools — typically two to three times larger than for white, middle-class, suburban students — owing perhaps to the fact that the tour was the first time they had visited an art museum.

Clearly, however, we can conclude that visiting an art museum exposes students to a diversity of ideas that challenge them with different perspectives on the human condition. Expanding access to art, whether through programs in schools or through visits to area museums and galleries, should be a central part of any school’s curriculum.