First graders who received instruction in music listening had significantly higher reading scores than those first graders who did not receive the instruction but were similar in age, IQ and socioeconomic status. The same teacher taught reading to all the students. Those given music instruction were taught for 40 minutes a day for 7 months and learned to recognize melodic and rhythmic elements in folk songs. They scored in the 88th percentile for reading performance and the non-instructed control group scored in the 72nd percentile.

source: Educational Leadership, November, 1998, p. 38 
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development 
article: "The Music in Our Minds" 
Norman M. Weinberger, Professor of Psychobiology at the University of California, Irvine, referencing research of Hurwitz et al, 1975, Journal of Learning Disabilities, 8, 45–51

Elements of music and reading are highly related in first graders. Students were tested on various elements of music and reading and a strong relationship was found between a student's awareness of pitch and their ability to sound out material in reading--material that included standard language and phonetic material.

source: Educational Leadership, November, 1998, p. 39 
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development 
article: "The Music in Our Minds" 
Norman M. Weinberger, Professor of Psychobiology at the University of California, Irvine, referencing research of S.J. Lamb and A.H. Gregory, 1993, Educational Psychology, 13, 19–26

Second grade students given piano instruction in addition to spatial reasoning instruction improved more in spatial reasoning than those given spatial reasoning instruction only, English language training instead of piano, or no special instruction.

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, 2002, p. 110
study: Enhanced Learning of Proportional Math Through Music Training and Spatial-Temporal Training

Fourth grade students considered "emotionally disturbed" improved their writing quality and quantity when given music to listen to (via headphones) versus writing in silence. 

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, 2002, p. 118
study: Listening to Music Enhances Spatial-Temporal Reasoning: Evidence for the "Mozart Effect"

A high level of involvement in instrumental music co-related to high achievement in math proficiency. This held true among all students and among those students in the lowest socio-economic (SES) quartile. More than twice as many 12th grade, high music-involved, low SES students performed at high levels of math proficiency as non music-involved, low SES 12th grade students. Instrumental music involvement also related to high-music, low SES students closing the math achievement gap with higher SES students. In 8th grade, high-music, low SES students closed the expected achievement gap that low SES students would usually have with the average student. By 12th grade the high-music, low SES students had pulled significantly ahead of the average student in math proficiency (33.1 percent to 21.3 percent).

source: Champions of Change, 1999
p. 11, figures 8 and 9
p. 12, text and figures 10 and 11
Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California at Los Angeles
study: Involvement in the Arts and Human Development: General Involvement and Intensive Involvement in Music and Theater Arts

The opportunity to be instructed in music or dance disciplines offered a variety of compelling social benefits for students in addition to the knowledge and skill of an art. For some of the underprivileged students offered this opportunity to be treated as gifted and talented, the participation in the art form was an emotional safe haven from family turmoil. The art forms were an assimilation tool for recent immigrants and other new kids. Achievement in the art and friendships built in that process bolstered students as they entered new situations of various kinds. Performances brought the broader community together in pride. Horizons were broadened through access to classes at studios and trips to theaters outside of students' immediate neighborhoods and offered a glimpse of the broader cultural world. "Ultimately the skills and discipline students gained, the bonds they formed with peers and adults, and the rewards they received through instruction and performing fueled their talent development journey and helped most achieve success both in and outside of school."

source: Champions of Change, 1999, p.77–78
National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented
University of Connecticut, Storrs
study: Artistic Talent Development for Urban Youth: The Promise and the Challenge

The various approaches to music instruction that were found to support learning in spatial-temporal reasoning reflect the same approaches included in the national standards in music education. Learning traditional music notation led to even stronger results than other music instruction.

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, 2002, p. 114
study: Learning to Make Music Enhances Spatial Reasoning

In a review of many studies, the "Mozart-effect" was found valid and important for educators in an unexpected way.  The positive effect of listening to Mozart's, and others', music on spatial reasoning (mentally visualizing, moving and relating objects without any present) helps contradict some current ideas about learning that consider different learning functions in the brain to be distinct and unconnected.  The "Mozart effect" shows that areas of the brain used for spatial reasoning are also used for processing music.

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, 2002, p. 116
study: Listening to Music Enhances Spatial-Temporal Reasoning: Evidence for the "Mozart Effect"

A student making music experiences the "simultaneous engagement of senses, muscles, and intellect. Brain scans taken during musical performances show that virtually the entire cerebral cortex is active while musicians are playing." Different areas of the brain perform different functions from directing movement, to thinking, to feeling, to remembering including many sub-regions within those areas that relate to more specialized activities. Making music engages, and is increasingly seen to strengthen, a vast array of brain power.

source: Educational Leadership, November, 1998, p.38
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
article: "The Music in Our Minds"
Norman M. Weinberger, Professor of Psychobiology at the University of California, Irvine

Dramatic play, rhyming games, and songs are some of the language-rich activities that build pre-reading skills. The problems many children face in learning to read could be prevented with high-quality instruction that incorporates a range of pre-school language-building activities and early exposure to stories and books.

source: Young Children and the Arts: Making Creative Connections, 1998, p. 1
Arts Education Partnership
Referencing Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, 1998

Regular, frequent instruction in drama and sign language created higher scores in language development for Head Start students than for a control group not offered drama and sign language.  Drama and sign language were used to tap the physical, kinesthetic, and visual abilities of the 60 Head Start children studied. The four-year-olds participated in activities combining drama and sign language for four days a week throughout the 1987–88 school year. The children in the drama/sign language program scored significantly higher on the Head Start Measures Battery, Language Scale, than the 60 children in the control group.

study: Young Children and the Arts: Making Creative Connections, 1998, p. 20
Arts Education Partnership
Referencing Youth Theatre Journal
American Alliance for Theatre & Education
Drama and Sign Language: A Multisensory Approach to the Language Acquisition of Disadvantaged Preschool Children, vol. 6, No. 3, 1992

Imaginative play, coached by a teacher, enhances important learning abilities that help kindergarten children make physical and social sense of the world around them.

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, 2002, pp. 24–25
study: Role of Imaginative Play in Cognitive Development

In re-enacting stories, kindergarteners who stepped out of role to direct others in the enactment, or question the direction of the enactment added to their understanding and recall of the story more than their less active classmates. 

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, 2002, pp. 54–55
study: "You Can't Be Grandma: You're a Boy": Events Within the Thematic Fantasy Play Context that Contribute to Story Comprehension

Dramatic play appears to increase tendencies of early elementary school children to be thorough and explicit in their conveying of stories critical to success in school settings where these skills are required in written and oral language activities.

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, 2002, pp. 44–45
study: The Effect of Dramatic Play on Children's Generation of Cohesive Text

First and 2nd grade students who participated in drama to re-create a story they have heard read aloud have greater understanding of the story than those students who only heard the story.

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, 2002, p. 30
study: Children's Story Comprehension as a Result of Storytelling and Story Dramatization: A Study of the Child as Spectator and as Participant

Pre-writing exercises in drama and drawing significantly improved the quality of narrative writing of second and third-graders.

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, 2002, p.32
study: Drama and Drawing for Narrative Writing in Primary Grades

Ten weeks of in-class drama coaching in a remedial third and fourth-grade classroom helped the teacher and students transform their approach to reading and improve the students' attitude about and success in reading.  Dramatic training and expression offered students the opportunity to contribute their own background knowledge and understanding, improve their accuracy and momentum, broaden their understandings and expressive choices, and begin to see themselves as actors, or active readers.  That sense of achievement positively affected their self-perception.

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, 2002, pp. 56–57
study: The Flight of Reading: Shifts in Instruction, Orchestration, and Attitudes through Classroom Theatre

The use of creative drama with fifth-grade remedial reading students to act out stories read in class enables them to better understand what they read and also help them better understand reading they do not act out such as reading exercises found in standardized tests.

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, 2002, p. 22
study: The Effectiveness of Creative Drama as an Instructional Strategy to Enhance the Reading Comprehension Skills of Fifth-Grade Remedial Readers

Fifth and 6th graders' participation in improvisational drama throughout a school year resulted in greater use of expressive and interactional language skills as well as more traditional classroom informational language skills. Informational language skills involve lower-order thinking skills while expressive language used by these drama participants reveal and develop the ability to speculate, imagine, predict, reason, and evaluate their own learning—or, higher order thinking skills. Interactional language skills were found in students' exchanges with each other and later reflection on interactions.  Students' own reflections on the improvisations brought up moral issues, not typical in information-driven classrooms. The authors believe that, "Drama puts back the human content into what is predominantly a materialistic curriculum".

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Developments, 2002, pp. 50–51
study: Nadie Papers No. 1, Drama, Language and Learning.  Reports of the Drama and Language Research Project, Speech and Drama Center, Education Department of Tasmania

Creative drama exercises improved learning-disabled students' behavior and speaking skills necessary for success in the classroom. Regular and special education teachers determined which skills were necessary.  Learning-disabled students were tested with a comparison group before and after creative drama exercises.  Those who received creative drama improved social skills such as courtesy to others, self-control, focus on classroom work and following directions.  They also improved their oral expression skills.  These benefits were sustained when tested again two months after the end of the creative drama program.

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, 2002, p. 20
study: The Effects of Creative Drama on the Social and Oral Language Skills of Children with Learning Disabilities

Dance

Main Highlights Page | Multiple Arts | Drama | Music | Visual Arts | Dance

At-risk first grade students who were taught basic letter and sound connections through improvisational movement improved more in those basic reading skills than did the control group of similarly at-risk students. "The development of linguistic abilities mirrors the development of dance phrase making…dance can help children discover the 'music' of language."

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, 2002, p. 10
study: The Impact of Whirlwind's Basic Reading Through dance Program on First Grade Students' Basic Reading Skills: Study II

Teenagers serving time in detention facilities benefited from twice-weekly dance classes in ways that led the study's author to conclude, "Patience, and sometimes even compassion, can be social by-products of aesthetic engagement."

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, 2002, p. 13
study: Art and Community: Creating Knowledge Through Service in Dance

The opportunity to be instructed in music or dance disciplines offered a variety of compelling social benefits for students in addition to the knowledge and skill of an art. For some of the underprivileged students offered this opportunity to be treated as gifted and talented, the participation in the art form was an emotional safe haven from family turmoil. The art forms were an assimilation tool for recent immigrants and other new kids. Achievement in the art and friendships built in that process bolstered students as they entered new situations of various kinds. Performances brought the broader community together in pride. Horizons were broadened through access to classes at studios and trips to theaters outside of students' immediate neighborhoods and offered a glimpse of the broader cultural world. "Ultimately the skills and discipline students gained, the bonds they formed with peers and adults, and the rewards they received through instruction and performing fueled their talent development journey and helped most achieve success both in and outside of school."

source: Champions of Change, 1999, p.77–78
National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented
University of Connecticut, Storrs
study: Artistic Talent Development for Urban Youth: The Promise and the Challenge

• http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/9822d68t
• http://www.clta.uci.edu/publications.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_Through_Art
• http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/education/school-educator-programs/learning-through-art
• http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/27/books/27gugg.html 

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Developments, 2002, p. 142
study: Investigating the Educational Impact and Potential of the Museum of Modern Art's Visual Thinking curriculum: Final Report

Assessments of 6th graders' history understanding using drawing as well a writing helped students veal more of what they knew than using just writing.  This held true for both English language proficient and English limited students.

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, p. 141
study: The Arts, Language and Knowing:  An Experimental Study of the Potential of the Visual Arts for Assessing Academic Learning by Language Minority Students

Seventh grade boys who were "reluctant readers" but were interested in visual art were given several visual art exercises that resulted in them taking a more active role in reading and interpreting the text rather than just passively reading it. The students were asked to, "create cutouts or find objects that would represent characters and ideas in the story they were reading, and then use these to dramatize the story…draw a picture of strong visual impressions formed while reading a story…illustrate books…(and) depict visually the key details of nonfiction texts."

source: Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, 2002, p. 144
study: Reading is Seeing: using Visual Response to Improve the Literary Reading of Reluctant Readers