Art programme aids student literacy skills - study

Learning about paintings and scupture in school gives children a boost in other areas of literacy, according to a new study by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York.

The study, now in its second year, interviewed hundreds of New York City third graders, some of whom had participated in the Guggenheim Museum programme Learning Through Art, which places artists in city schools to work with children, and others who did not. The researchers found out that the children who participated showed improvements in various literacy skills.

The results of the study were presented at a conference last week at the Guggenheim Museum, which received a $640,000 grant to fund the project from the US Department of Education.

Researchers interviewed 605 students, some of whom learnt about a painting, Arshile Gorky's The Artist And His Mother, and a children's book, Kira-Kira, by Cynthia Kadohata.

The study found that students in the programme used more words to express themselves in interviews and performed better in six categories of literacy and critical thinking skills - including thorough description, hypothesising, reasoning and multiple interpretations - than did students who were not in the programme.

However, the Learning Through Art programme did not help improve the students' grades in the English language arts test, the study found. The researchers could not fully explain this, but suggested that the disparity might be related to the fact that the standardised test is written while the study's interviews were oral.

"The arts can be used as a tool for teaching critical skills that are necessary to literacy, and to ignore their potential for that is to ignore very powerful tools for the classroom," said Jackie Delamatre, education programme co-ordinator at the museum.

"We purposely chose to have students talk to us instead of writing because we thought they would show language skills, not purely reading and writing skills," said Johanna Jones, a senior associate with Randi Korn and Associates, a museum research company conducting the study.

Ms Jones said that the study, which graded students' responses as they talked about the painting and the passage from the book, found the same results during the past scholastic year as it did during the previous year.

"We really held our breath waiting for this year's results, and they turned out to be almost exactly the same - which means that last year's don't seem to have been an anomaly," she said.

While it is unknown exactly how learning about art helps literacy skills, she said that the hypothesis is that the use of both talking about art and using inquiry to help students tease apart the meaning of paintings helps them learn how to tease apart the meanings of texts too, and these apply those skills to reading.

The Guggenheim programme was originally called Learning To Read Through The Arts, and was created by a museum trustee in 1970. It has since then involved more than 130,000 students in many of public schools. The museum sends artists to spend one day a week at schools over a 10 to 20-week period to help students and teachers learn more about art. Students are also taken to the Guggenheim Museum to see exhibitions.

Kim Kanatani, director of education at the Guggenheim Museum, said that the study was a major contribution to the field of art and museum education. "We think it confirms what we as museum education professionals have intuitively known but haven't ever had the resources to prove."