The Effects of an Enriched Elementary Arts Education Program on Teacher Development, Artist Practices, and Student Achievement

Learning Through the Arts (LTTA) is a school transformation project developed by The Royal Conservatory of Music (Canada). The first elementary schools were founded in Toronto, Ontario, in 1995, and LTTA is currently operating in elementary schools in seven urban and rural sites across Canada. LTTA is designed with the goal of engaging students deeply in learning, through carefully designed math, science, history, geography, and language units that incorporate performing and visual arts into the learning process. This goal is achieved through a structured program of teacher development which includes the involvement of artists who work along with teachers to develop curricula. LTTA offers effective and sustainable professional development programs, based on the sharing of knowledge and skills between teachers, artists, and students, through multi-year partnerships. Artists model techniques and activities for teachers to implement in their classrooms and also work directly with students in schools.This articledescribes the baseline data gathered as the first part of the evaluation of the national LTTA program, for the students, teachers, parents, and administrators involved in the six sites that were established in 1999. Preliminary data were gathered over the 1999-2000 year. Canadian Achievement Tests (CAT/3) were used to assess students' performance in vocabulary, reading comprehension, and mathematics. In addition, writing samples were taken and scored holistically. Students also completed a survey indicating their interests in schooling in general and in the arts in particular, as well as in the activities they engaged in outside of school. Parents were asked to report on language(s) spoken at home, leisure activities, household income level, and the mother's education level. Teachers were surveyed regarding a variety of teaching beliefs and practices. Administrators were surveyed regarding their support for arts activities, both in terms of human and financial resources. Baseline data indicate that there are clear correlations between achievement in mathematics and language and engagement in arts activities, particularly with respect to music lessons (outside of school). That is, students who take music lessons outside of school perform significantly better on all language and mathematics measures than their peers who do not take music lessons. Not surprisingly, socio-economic status is also clearly related to arts activities and achievement, and strategies for tracking changes within socio-economic groups over the next two years of the study are planned. It was also found that attitudes towards various art forms are established in students as early as the first grade, with boys being less interested and perceiving themselves as less skilled, for example, in singing and dancing than their female peers. Hypotheses and general issues for consideration for the next two years of work are described, and methods for exploring those issues and hypotheses are also discussed.

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