Art program may aid student literacy skills -study

By Torrye Jones

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A school-based art program appears to
boost students’ literacy skills, a study released by the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York said on Friday.

The study, now in its second year, found that students who
participated in “Learning Through Art,” which places artists in
city schools to work with children, showed improvements in
various literacy skills.

Researchers interviewed 605 third-graders, some who took
part in the program and others who did not, about a painting,
Arshile Gorky’s “The Artist and His Mother,” and a children’s
book, “Kira-Kira,” by Cynthia Kadohata.

The findings showed that students in the program used more
words to express themselves in interviews and did better in
skills such as thorough description, hypothesizing, reasoning
and multiple interpretations.

But “Learning Through Art” had no effect on students’
English language arts standardized test scores, the study said.

“The arts can be used as a tool for teaching critical
skills that are necessary to literacy, and to ignore their
potential for that is to ignore very powerful tools for the
classroom,” said Jackie Delamatre, education program
coordinator at the museum.

The results of the study were presented at a conference
this week at the Guggenheim Museum, which received a $640,000
grant to fund the project from the U.S. Department of
Education, said Kim Kanatani, Guggenheim’s director of
education.

The research is being conducted by Randi Korn & Associates
Inc., a museum research company in Alexandria, Virginia.