Cognitive Abilities and Arts

Arts and Education

Lack of Arts in School Curriculum affects learning and interest in learning

School leaders and policymakers pay little attention to arts despite the experience that, allowing young people to participate in arts and culture can influence their development tremendously. The major problem lies with the fact that very few people bother to carry out a research, and record the far-reaching effect arts and culture can have on students. Instead, schools, researchers, and policymakers spend more time focusing on what is easily and commonly measured: reading and math success. This has led art proponents into trying to establish a connection between arts and higher reading and math grades -- a claim that still lacks scholarly, scientific evidence. For other advocates of arts, there is no need and no way to measure the benefits (Greene, et al., 2014).

In recent years, most attention with regards to education have been making numeracy and literacy top priorities, with the aim of creating employment opportunities for students, and as a vehicle for fostering a knowledge economy. With the concern that the more creative subjects are being increasingly ignored as extra-curricular additions, where the middle-class shows dominance, arts associations have prepared their defenses. Art offers an exciting way to document growth. A child's skills improve same way reading and writing skills get better with time. It is the responsibility of both the teachers and parents to make sure the children have exposure to lots of relevant materials to enable them create art. Once different materials are made available, it gives the children the chance to choose to make use of the materials or not. However, when the exposure is not there, they lose the chance to decide what they want to use and what they do not want.

Creation of art is one great way children make their own choices and provide solutions to problems. Decision-making is needed in every step: the right color to use, the best way to draw a line, the best size of image to draw. Their sense of ownership about the object increases with each choice they make. Everyone has an active imagination. Art enhances this ability. Art nurtures and develops children's imagination. Through art, children give their abstract ideas visual manifestations. Children having trouble with other school works may find it easier to express themselves through art. It is one way to express certain latent talents. Art is a channel through which one can communicate one's feelings, ideas, and even solutions to problems in more ways than the conventional written or verbal means. The results of a 10-year national study carried out by Shirley Brice Heath of Stanford University, showed that young people who took part in effective community programs that were non-school arts in communities with inadequate resources, when compared with a number of national students were found to be:

• About 8 times more likely to be recipients of an award for community service

• About 4 times more likely to be awarded an academic award, like being on the roll of honor

• About 3 times more likely to receive an award for school attendance

• About 4 times more likely to take part in a school fair

• Most likely to record higher scores on their SAT exams for college admission if they have actively participated in after-school arts classes for over four years

It is a normal to see school program funders treat both performing and visual arts as mere frivolities -- school programs that should only be included in the curriculum when there are some extra cash to accommodate them, and at the same time the very first set of programs to be dropped whenever any type of crisis surface. Families can make provisions for both visual and performing acts as a way of creating a harmonious balance in the lives of their kids. According to studies, these art activities have consistent positive effects on the learning abilities of students and some other broader outcomes. Nevertheless, hardly any of these is complete for carrying out an effective trial due to some weaknesses in most of these assessments.

Pre-school pupils:

Some specific varieties of outcomes are known be affected by learning how to play a music instrument: spatial-temporal ability, IQ scores, creativity, language, and reading.

Primary school pupils:

Integrating music into class work and mastering how to play a certain musical instrument have positive impacts on the learning outcomes of young children, especially, cognitive abilities, and to a certain extent, their social behavior, and self-esteem. However, due to flaws in the design of a most of the studies we apply caution when it comes to recommending full trial. 20 out of the 30 studies recommended positive effects. Four out of these twenty had quality ranging from medium to weak. The evidence presented by these studies may be considered weak, but bringing their positive effects together suggest a potential worth pursuing in this field.