Exciting Arts Education Research-Some Links

My Google Reader took me on a thought-provoking Web cruise today. Some of my stops were familiar places with new information while others were exciting discoveries.

I started by investigating a link to the Academy for Early Learning on 21st century skills. I had to comment on the fresh take Lois Feibus had regarding 21st century tools, and my comment suggested ASCD's Whole Child blog.

I visited there and found some promising news about correlations between music education and students' cognitive development and academic achievement:

1. A study by two Ohio State University researchers, Darby E. Southgate and Vincent J. Roscigno, concludes that "Music participation, both inside and outside of school, is associated with measures of academic achievement among children and adolescents. Future work should further delineate the relevant processes of music involvement, as well as how background inequalities and music involvement intersect in relation to educational performance." (The study appears in Social Science Quarterly, 2009, vol. 90, issue 1, pages 4-21.)


2. Schuylkill Valley Elementary School in Pennsylvania has launched a Suzuki violin program for all of its 170 kindergarten students and is planning to work with researchers at Penn State Berks to evaluate the cognitive development and achievement of the students in the program. According to a New York Daily Record article cited by the Whole Child blog, the program was inspired by the three-year study, "Learning, Arts and the Brain" by the Charles A. Dana Foundation. The Dana Foundation sponsors and highlights neuroscience research on arts education.

Reading a news item by Janet Eilbert at Dana's site, I ran across a link to Dewey21C, a great blog about arts education by Richard Kessler, executive director of the Center for Arts Education. There I found out about the Teaching Artist Research Project (TARP) at the the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. This study looks closely at the work of teaching artist communities in several cities.

I better stop now. This could go on all day!