The Arts and School Reform: Lessons and Possibilities From the Annenberg Challenge Arts Projects

The three Annenberg Challenge Arts projects (in New York City, Minneapolis, and a national consortium of schools) fostered a civic commitment to arts education in their local schools and communities, which led to an expansion in local ownership and investment in arts education. The report offers insights from arts education for school reform practitioners (build reform from within; make excellence equitable) and lessons from standards-based reform for arts educators (rethink accountability; begin with permanence in mind)

Advancing Arts Education through an Expanded School Day: Lessons from Five Schools

In schools across the country, educators recognize the power of the arts to change young lives. They know that students' sustained engagement with enriching, high-quality experiences in the arts promotes essential skills and perspectives -- like the capacity to solve problems, express ideas, harness and hone creativity, and persevere toward a job well done. And yet today, educators at many schools that operate with conventional schedules are forced to choose between offering their students valuable opportunities to pursue the arts and focusing on other rigorous core classes that also are necessary for success in the 21st century. This study, which highlights an exciting new approach, is produced by the National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL), an organization dedicated to expanding learning time to improve student achievement and enable a well-rounded education, with support from The Wallace Foundation, a national philanthropy seeking to improve education and enrichment for disadvantaged children. In these pages, we present portraits of five schools that are advancing arts education through an expanded school day as they create vibrant and inclusive models of truly enriching education for all students

Contours of Inclusion: Frameworks and Tools for Evaluating Arts in Education

This collection of essays explores various arts education-specific evaluation tools, as well as considers Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the inclusion of people with disabilities in the design of evaluation instruments and strategies. Prominent evaluators Donna M. Mertens, Robert Horowitz, Dennie Palmer Wolf, and Gail Burnaford are contributors to this volume. The appendix includes the AEA Standards for Evaluation. (Contains 10 tables, 2 figures, 30 footnotes, and resources for additional reading.) This is a proceedings document from the 2007 VSA arts Research Symposium that preceded the American Evaluation Association's (AEA) annual meeting in Baltimore, MD

Planting the Seeds: Orchestral Music Education as a Context for Fostering Growth Mindsets

Growth mindset is an important aspect of children\u27s socioemotional development and is subject to change due to environmental influence. Orchestral music education may function as a fertile context in which to promote growth mindset; however, this education is not widely available to children facing economic hardship. This study examined whether participation in a program of orchestral music education was associated with higher levels of overall growth mindset and greater change in levels of musical growth mindset among children placed at risk by poverty. After at least 2 years of orchestral participation, students reported significantly higher levels of overall growth mindset than their peers; participating students also reported statistically significant increases in musical growth mindset regardless of the number of years that they were enrolled in orchestral music education. These findings have implications for future research into specific pedagogical practices that may promote growth mindset in the context of orchestral music education and more generally for future studies of the extra-musical benefits of high-quality music education

Portfolio Assessment: Sampling Student Work

A newsletter, Educational Leadership, Vol. 46, No. 7. Portfolio Assessment: Sampling Student Work, When students maintain portfolios of their work, they learn to assess their own progress as learners, and teachers gain new views of their accomplishments in teaching. A consortia of administrators, teachers and researchers in the Pittsburgh schools have been searching for alternatives to standardized assessments. A three-way collaborative project, Arts Propel, is composed of the Pittsburgh Public Schools, Educational Testing Services and Project Zero at Harvard Graduate School of Education to demonstrate that it is possible to asses the thinking in arts and humanities

Opening Up Assessment

A newsletter, Educational Leadership, Opening Up Assessment by Dennie Palmer Wolf. From students' projects, portfolios, and interviews, Pittsburgh art teachers participating in Arts Propel are learning to "read" students' growth in learning. Arts Propel is a three-way collaborative project to look at what the arts teach and how the arts teachers examine their students. The newsletter is updated with information on the arts propel project and the research behind arts education

Artistic Learning: What and Where Is It?

A Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 22, No. Artistic Learning: What and Where Is It? by Dennie Palmer Wolf. The journal has two pictures of student work that was made twelve years apart and a series of questions that about the altered roles of the final productions. The prints and questions come from an intensive study of artistic thinking known as Arts Propel. Propel is a collaboration between research and educators to assess artistic development

“Some Things in My House Have a Pulse and a Downbeat” The Role of Folk and Traditional Arts Instruction in Supporting Student Learning

The authors investigated the association between participation in Nations in Neighborhoods (NiN), a program of folk and traditional arts instruction, and achievement in English language arts in a sample of low-income elementary school students, many of whom were recent immigrants and English language learners.  The program drew on the core practices of traditional and folk arts – sociocritical literacies that bridge home and school, multi-modal instruction, apprenticeship learning, and communal effort – to provide students with the confidence and strategies of accomplished learners. English language arts achievement was assessed using a standardized state proficiency exam. Students who participated in the program received significantly higher overall scores on the exam after controlling for gender, ethnicity, English language learner and special education classifications.  These findings suggest that an arts education program featuring folk and traditional arts engages students in practices that have measurable effects on their literacy development