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Art program may aid student literacy skills -study

Posted on: Friday, 28 July 2006, 18:06 CDT

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.

Source: REUTERS

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