New York Times Nov.
24, 2013
Art Makes You Smart
By BRIAN KISIDA, JAY P. GREENE and DANIEL H.
BOWEN
FOR many
education advocates, the arts are a panacea: They supposedly increase test
scores, generate social responsibility and turn around failing schools. Most of
the supporting evidence, though, does little more than establish correlations
between exposure to the arts and certain outcomes. Research that demonstrates a
causal relationship has been virtually nonexistent.
A few
years ago, however, we had a rare opportunity to explore such relationships
when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American
Art opened in Bentonville, Ark. Through a large-scale,
random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we 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, which opened in November 2011, was founded by Alice Walton, the
daughter of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. It is impressive, with 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, we were contacted by the museum’s education department. They
recognized that the opening of a major museum in an area that had never had one
before was an unusual event that ought to be studied. But they also had a
problem. Because the school tours were being offered free, in an area where
most children had very little prior exposure to cultural institutions, demand
for visits far exceeded available slots. In the first year alone, the museum
received applications from 525 school groups requesting tours for more than
38,000 students.
As social
scientists, we knew exactly how to solve this problem. We partnered with the
museum and conducted a lottery to fill the available slots. By randomly
assigning school tours, we were able to allocate spots fairly. Doing so also
created a natural experiment to study the effects of museum
visits on students, the results of which we published in the journals
Education Next and Educational Researcher.
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, we
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. We also asked them to write an essay in response to a
work of art that was unfamiliar to them.
These
essays were then coded using a critical-thinking-skills assessment program
developed by researchers working with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in
Boston.
Further,
we directly measured whether students are more 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.
Moreover,
most of the benefits we observed are 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.
Further
research is needed to determine what exactly about the museum-going experience
determines the strength of the outcomes. How important is the structure of the
tour? The size of the group? The type of art presented?
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.
Brian Kisida is a
senior research associate and Jay P. Greene is a
professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas. Daniel H. Bowen is a
postdoctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute of Rice University.
