Positive Impact Of Arts Integration On The English Language Arts

The Arts in its various forms (visual, performance and wellness) have long been believed to have transformational capabilities. The subject has always been lauded for the positive effects it has had and continues to have on those who have been actively exposed to it. Scholars, practitioners, researchers, educators and a host of other individuals would soon realize this positive impact and seek to implement it into the school curriculum to see if the same ‘transformational’ qualities could be applied to student achievement and development. Over two decades of research and studies have uncovered that the Arts do in fact have strong public support and has made considerable strides in the arena of student learning and encouraging a scholar’s attitudes toward school. These studies generally agree that Art is not only vital to making the education provided for students well rounded but is also a …show more content…
The authors argued that arts education had a broader impact in schools and students. It allowed them to improve their academic results in other subject areas. Their analysis and eventual conclusions were based a longitudinal study of a thorough multi-art integration model that was implemented in public elementary schools in the Los Angeles area. They placed the focus on the importance of standardized test scores and uncovered that schools that infused art concepts into lessons about other topics realized “consistent and significant gains in student proficiency on standardized tests of English Language Arts (ELA) when compared to matched comparison school sites with standalone arts programming.” (Peppler, Powell, Thompson, Catterall, 2014) The school analysis will prove useful in analyzing the Newark context and explore whether or not these findings will apply in an environment plagued by other