BENTONVILLE, Ark. - After a single visit to an art museum, thousands of students understood themes of irony, farming choices during the Depression, energy use during industrialization and slave-trade subterfuge.
They recalled the details and greater ideas from those lessons weeks after visiting the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.
In a groundbreaking research project, field trips were found to enhance critical thinking skills, encourage tolerance, and lead to more historical empathy and taste for the arts.
It is being called the most rigorous and largest examination on the effect of school tours to an art museum.
It's also good news for Tulsa schools already involved in ramping up their arts-related field trips.
"Education, as you know, is more than just part of our program," Alice Walton, museum founder and board chairwoman, said in a Monday press conference. "Everything we do is geared toward education and making art available and accessible.
"We believe everyone benefits from art and its power to inspire and educate. The data we have to share shows the importance of arts in education."
What can a field trip do?: The Crystal Bridges project connects empirical data to anecdotal philosophies.
In this era of education budget cuts and high-stakes testing, field trips and arts programs took a back seat.
It's easy to argue that a four-hour field trip is too costly and takes away from class time needed to boost those ever-important scores.
Arts lovers counter that the benefits go beyond reading and writing and get into cognitive and creative skills.
The Crystal Bridges project set out to answer: What is really gained from a one-time museum class trip?
The placement of the museum in an area without any other cultural institutions provided a "natural experiment" to gather data, researchers say.
A museum endowment pays for the school costs of transportation, lunches, pre- and post-visit education materials, and substitute teachers, if needed.
This created an influx of school field trip applications, which were put into a random lottery.
Researchers from the University of Arkansas used this process to establish control groups, which are crucial in collecting information for a scientific study.
The project included 10,912 students and 489 teachers at 123 schools, producing 531,781 bits of data.
"What we have is scratching the surface of the data set," said Jay Greene, 21st Century Chair in Education Reform and head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas College of Education and Health Professions.
'It makes an impression on them': Part of the study involved a quality museum experience.
Crystal Bridges schedules the school visits outside the general public hours with full-time educators handling the tours, said Anne Kraybill, the museum's school programs manager.
"All the learning is very unique," Kraybill said. "We are not lecturing at them. They bring their own insights, their own observations and own understanding to this so we can expand on their own interpretative framework and expand on their own ideas of the world.
"We expand on how they learn, learn with each other and learn from works of art."
In follow-up interviews weeks later, students recalled details of stories behind paintings and discussions about the intentions of the artists.
The gains were greatest - sometimes three times higher - among students in rural areas, low-income schools and first-time visitors.
"All these bits of historical information, which seem kind of obscure, are retained by students at very high rates who went on the tour," Greene said. "The control group had no chance to know this because they weren't exposed to this. This is not a test of whether students learn better from being shown art or taught in some other way.
"What it does demonstrate is that a school art-museum tour conveys a lot of factual information and historical information, and students retain that at high rates, even with no external rewards. It makes an impression on them."
Any Given Child: Tulsa Public Schools is already on the road to gaining these benefits.
The district landed a spot in the Any Given Child program of the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts to provide an arts-related field trip to every student from kindergarten through eighth grades.
Each grade will attend a specific experience, including the ballet, opera, visual arts, orchestra, dance and museums.
This is the first year of the field trips.
The trips are planned with curriculum in mind, having coordinated lessons between the teachers and participating community arts groups.
So it's possible that Tulsa and Arkansas students are on the edge of an arts education revival.
That simple museum field trip is much more than it seems, baby-stepping our way into well-rounded communities and new ways of thinking.
"We wondered if, besides recalling the details of their tour, did visiting an art museum have a transformative effect on students." Greene said. "Our study demonstrates that it did."
Crystal Bridges field trip study
When students were surveyed weeks after going to the museum:
88 percent knew that Eastman Johnson's painting "At the Camp - Spinning Yarns and Whittling" depicts abolitionists making maple syrup to undermine the sugar industry, which relied on slave labor.
82 percent recalled that Norman Rockwell's "Rosie the Riveter" emphasizes the importance of women entering the workforce during World War II.
80 percent recognized that Kerry James Marshall's "Our Town" offers an African-American perspective of real and idealized visions of the American dream.
79 percent recalled that Thomas Hart Benton's "Ploughing It Under" is a depiction of a farmer destroying his crops as part of a Depression-era price support program.
70 percent remembered that Romare Bearden's "Sacrifice" is part of the Harlem Renaissance art movement.
Policy implications
- Visits to cultural institutions have significant benefits for students.
- Policymakers need to ensure that schools have resources to take their students on tours of cultural institutions.
- School administrators need to decide to use their resources and time for these tours.
- Philanthropists need to build and maintain these cultural institutions with quality educational programs.
- More rigorous research is needed on the effects of culturally enriching experiences on students.
Source: Crystal Bridges and the University of Arkansas
Original Print Headline: Arts study shows kids benefit big
See the study
Read more about the Crystal Bridges research project.
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