Doing Well and Doing Good by Doing Art: The Effects of Education in the Visual and Performing Arts on the Achievements and Values of Young Adults

by James S. Catterall

First-time offered at a discount - ORIGINALLY $19.99! Professor James S. Catterall of UCLA her presents his analyses of long-term outcomes for the students featured in Champions of Change a decade ago, 12,000 students now followed through age 26. The impacts of intensive involvement in the visual and performing arts during secondary school on young adults are shown to include doing better and going further in college (doing well) and greater involvement in community service and pro-social activities (doing good). The book presents assessments of arts-rich versus arts-poor schools, an intriguing comparison of passionate involvement in the arts versus athletics in school, and the fortunes of limited English speakers in arts-rich versus arts-poor schools. Nick Rabkin, formerly Senior Arts and Culture Program Officer at the MacArthur Foundation ... Unlike other research on the effects of arts education, Catterall was able to show that low-income students benefited from arts learning even more than more privileged students. This new study picks up the same thread and shows that the positive effects of arts education last well into adulthood. And Professor Shirley Brice Heath, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and Professor, Brown University This book will show students how someone can make statistical analyses comprehensible for those who work in schools, and those who need to think much more theoretically and in terms of research findings... Several of the findings were quite surprising to me, for I had forgotten that the NELS data would provide data with such "long arms" beyond school and family. Such a gift the book will be for so many. (Los I-Group Books, 172 pp. (2009).

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Blaine Welgraven · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Sometimes the solutions to complex problems are hiding in plain sight, but we still fail to see them. There’s been a public consensus that our schools are in crisis for over three decades. During that period, arts education has been consistently eroded in our schools, the victim of budget cuts and policy makers who are consumed with raising scores on standardized tests.”—Nick Rabkin, Senior Research Scientists, National Opinion Research Center

With that intro, Dr. James Catterall introduces the premise of a research project that has consumed more than a decade of his life--to demonstrate across a broad swath of society and socio-economic statuses that K-12 students with consistent high-arts integration actually do perform better both educationally and socially than their low-art peers. Using a statistical database (NELS) consisting of more than 25,000 students, Catterall masses a substantive, correlative relationship between arts-involvement and heightened student performance. The work breaks down into six thematic chapters, with the first being the most pivotal to Catterall's case/the readers understanding:

Involvement in the Arts/Success in Secondary School: Here, Catterall examines the study that first promoted his research--a 1998 monograph published in Americans for the Arts. The results were groundbreaking at the time, as they showed substantial statistical differences across low-art and high-art groups, but demonstrated further that those results carried across differing SES levels. He also reveals the initial impetus to carry the study beyond 10th grade, following the same cohort of students into their senior year in an effort to track the results of arts-integration, their relative access to the arts, and the effects of the arts on their post-high school movements/social conception.

For the researcher/grant specialist, Catterall's work is a goldmine of charts, graphs, data-sets, and concise-clear writing that all readily lend themselves to grants/sponsorship/presentation work. It's proven invaluable in my three-plus years in the nonprofit industry.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a good book. I'll need to re-read it because I'm not the best at reading statistical analysis but some amazing information on how the arts benefits students.