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Researchers Affirm "Mozart" and New Drama Effects, But Many Arts-Academic Links Overstated

A New Study by Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education

A new study from Harvard Graduate School of Education's Project Zero found demonstrable links between experiences with music and drama and increases in certain cognitive skills, but also showed no connection in many areas between arts education and students' academic achievement.

By far the largest and most comprehensive study on this topic ever conducted, "THE ARTS AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT: WHAT THE EVIDENCE SHOWS," confirms claims that listening to music temporarily enhances spatial skills (the controversial "Mozart Effect"), as well as claims that children who study music gain skill in spatial reasoning. The researchers also found evidence linking dramatization with improvements in verbal skills. However, researchers found no generalizable, causal links between studying the arts and improvement in SAT scores, grades, or reading scores.

The three-year study--directed by Project Zero researchers Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland and funded by the Bauman Family Foundation--reviewed 50 years of arts education research, analyzing 188 relevant studies. The researchers summarized studies that related particular art forms to specific types of academic achievement through the powerful statistical technique of meta-analysis, a method common in such fields as medicine and public health. The comprehensive report appears in an invited special issue of The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Fall/Winter 2000, and its results were recently presented at a meeting of arts educators and researchers convened by the J. Paul Getty Trust. Robert Rosenthal, Professor Emeritus at Harvard and an expert in the technique of meta-analysis, calls the study, "A truly scholarly and scientific look at what is known about the effects of arts study on academic achievement...a major achievement."

We found evidence that specific art forms support specific kinds of thinking and learning, but in other cases there's no clear link between the arts and academic skills. These interesting relationships between arts and non-arts learning deserve further rigorous investigation and exploration in classroom practice," says Winner.

Hetland adds, "Arts advocates need to stop making sweeping claims about the arts as a magic pill for turning students around academically. Arts teachers should not be held accountable for student test scores in other areas. Instead, arts in the curriculum should be justified in terms of their intrinsic merit--as they were in ancient Greece. An education without the arts is an impoverished education, and that leads to an impoverished society."

Conclusions

Clear Evidence that Music Improves Spatial-Temporal Reasoning, Drama Improves Verbal Skill

Based on 45 reports, researchers found evidence that spatial-temporal reasoning improves when children learn to make music, and this kind of reasoning improves temporarily when adults listen to certain kinds of music, including Mozart. The finding suggests that music and spatial reasoning are related psychologically (i.e., they may rely on some of the same underlying skills) and perhaps neurologically as well (i.e., they may rely on some of the same, or proximal, brain areas). However, the existing reports do not reveal conclusively why listening to music affects spatial-temporal thinking.

Based on 80 reports, researchers found a link between classroom drama (acting out texts) and improvements in a variety of verbal areas including oral and written understanding and recall of stories, oral and written language development, and reading readiness and achievement. In all cases, students who enacted texts were compared to students who read the same texts but did not act them out. Drama not only helped children's verbal skills for the texts enacted; it also helped children's verbal skills when applied to new, non-enacted texts.

Limited Evidence that Music Improves Math, Dance Improves Nonverbal Reasoning

Based on six reports, researchers found a small causal relationship between music training and math. That is, students who studied music improved in math more than students who did not study music. But this effect combined only 6 studies and thus no firm conclusions can be reached at this point, according to the researchers.

Based on three reports, researchers found a small to medium sized causal relationship between dance and improved nonverbal reasoning skills. Researchers again call for further study before any firm conclusions are drawn.

No Clear Evidence that Arts Improve Verbal, Math, or Creativity Test Scores, Grades, or Reading Ability

Based on 50 reports, researchers found no clear evidence that students' test scores or grades improve as a consequence of studying the arts.

Although there was a correlation between studying the arts and academic achievement as measured primarily by test scores, these links do not show that studying the arts causes test scores to rise," says Winner. "All that this link tells us is that students who study the arts tend to be high academic achievers. High achieving students, no matter what their ethnic or racial group, no matter what their social class, may choose to study the arts. This would account for the correlation between arts study and academic achievement." When the researchers examined only the studies testing whether arts study actually causes test scores to improve, they found no effect.

Researchers found that the combined existing studies do not allow a conclusion that studying the arts enhances creative thinking (as measured by standard creativity tests, whose validity is questionable), nor that studying music, visual arts, or dance improves reading ability. "We need better tests and more studies," Hetland said.

About Project Zero

Harvard Project Zero is a research group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education that explores the development of learning in children, adults, and organizations. Its mission is to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts, as well as in humanistic and scientific disciplines, at individual and institutional levels.

Ellen Winner is Professor of Psychology at Boston College and Senior Research Associate at Harvard Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the author of Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts, The Point of Words: Children's Understanding of Metaphor and Irony, and Gifted Children: Myths and Realities. Her work focuses on the developmental psychology of the arts.

Lois Hetland is a researcher at Harvard Project Zero, directs Project Zero's Summer Institutes for Educators, and consults on professional and curriculum development. Before enrolling in the doctoral program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she trained in music and visual arts and taught in programs of general instruction in elementary and middle school classrooms.

For More Information

Contact Ellen Winner at 617-552-4118, Lois Hetland at 617-496-7096, or Christine Sanni at (617) 496-5873, or read REAP's "Executive Summary" online.

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