Art Makes You Smart???

Research has shown that Art Education is important to the development of a child's creativity, critical thinking and life skills. If you find interesting reports or articles, please let us know at info@idahoartlab.org

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Childhood Creativity Leads to Innovation in Adulthood
(October 24, 2013 by Christopher Bergland in The Athlete's Way)
Researchers link arts and crafts in childhood to financial success in adulthood.

Arts in Education Week - Resolution
(July 2010 - U. S. Senate)
On July 27, 2010, the U. S. Senate passed a resolution designating the second week in September 'Arts In Education Week'. This resolution stresses the importance of art education of ALL disciplines. an excerpt from the resolution reads: "Whereas arts education, comprising a rich array of disciplines including dance, music, theatre, media arts, literature, design, and visual arts, is a core academic subject and an essential element of a complete and balanced education for all students".

The Creativity Crisis: For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it.
(July 2010 - Newsweek, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman)
"The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful. There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result). The child participants in the study who came up with more good ideas grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

The creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing video games rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children."

Best Practices in Visual Arts Education
(October 2009 - Think 360 Arts blog, by Cheri Isgreen in collaboration with Connie Stewart)
"This paper reports a synthesis of the discussion held on 09 May 2009 among twenty-one visual art educators who convened at the Denver Art Museum ... about promising practices for visual art teachers. This paper articulates specific recommendations to support teachers, schools, school districts, and state boards as they make decisions affecting visual art programs. "

Why Arts Education Is Crucial, and Who's Doing It Best
(January 2009 - The George Lucas Educational Foundationby Fran Smith)
"Years of research show that art education is closely linked to almost everything that we as a nation say we want for our children and demand from our schools: academic achievement, social and emotional development, civic engagement, and equitable opportunity." This report provides studies to back up this claim.

Arts in Education: Critical to Developing
(Spring 2008 - Center for Policy Entrepreneurship, by Kristin Bugbee)
"In today’s public school system, test-driven accountability has become the norm, thanks in large part to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and fifteen years of standards-based reform. School districts across the country have made significant changes to curricula to meet the growing demand for improved performance in reading and math. As a result, there has been a significant decrease in academic focus on the arts and their integration into educational programs." This report cites statistics relating to art education and its importance in our school curriculum.

Learning, Arts and the Brain: The Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition
(March 2008 - The Dana Consortium, organized by Michael Gazzaniga, Ph.D.)
Learning, Arts and the Brain is a three year study conducted by neuroscientists to study the cognitive effects that arts education has on the brain. Their research was concluded in March 2008. The mission of this study was to answer the question "Are smart people drawn to the arts or does art training make you smarter?"

The conclusion of this study, conducted by seven distinguished universities, was that those children who get involved in the arts have a greater attention span and heightened memory retrieval that aid in not just their arts achievements but in other disciplines as well.

The Arts in Contemporary Education: Reinventing schools to meet the challenges of the global innovation economy.
(March 2008 - The School Administrator, by John M. Eger)
The demand for a new workforce to meet the challenges of a global knowledge economy is rapidly increasing. As a special report in Business Week magazine observed last year: “The game is changing. It isn’t just about math and science anymore. It’s about creativity, imagination, and, above all, innovation.” Most analysts studying the new global economy agree that the growing “creative and innovative” economy represents America’s salvation. But how do we make someone innovative and creative? What must our schools and our communities be doing to ensure we are nurturing and attracting the most innovative and creative workers?

Arts found to up learning ante: Study finds creativity in the curriculum boosts academic performance
(Oct. 2008 - The Denver Post, by Jeremy P. Meyer)

Art for our sake: School arts classes matter more than ever - but not for the reasons you think
(Sept. 2007 - The Boston Globe, by Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland)

Are They Really Ready to Work? Employer's Perspectives on the Basic Knowledge and Applied Skills of New Entrants to the 21st Centurey U.S. work Force
(2006)
Creativity/Innovation is projected to “increase in importance” for future workforce entrants, according to more than 70 percent (73.6 percent) of employer respondents. Currently, however, more than half of employer respondents (54.2 percent) report new workforce entrants with a high school diploma to be “deficient” in this skill set, and relatively few consider two-year and four-year college-educated entrants to be “excellent” (4.1 percent and 21.5 percent, respectively).