This participation is often linked to their success in other spheres of life and learning. In a frequently referenced study conducted by researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles, it was found that students with moderate to high arts engagements, generally excelled on standardized achievement tests when compared with their peers who had low arts involvement. The nationwide longitudinal study retrieved at random, data for 25,000 middle and high school students from the United States Department of Education, a federal database. Dr. Caterall (1998), through this research was also able to postulate that the students that he categorized as high arts-involved students also consumed fewer hours of TV programming, were more apt to undertake more community service projects and were more enthusiastic about school and learning. The author also highlighted the research findings were the same for students irrespective of their socioeconomic status. The results were impressive and the findings significant because it provided “a substantial case for the importance of the arts in the academic lives of middle and high schoolers.” (Caterall, …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