Evaluating a New Mandate for Arts Education
Abstract
In this chapter, we present the results of our assessment of the impacts of arts education on the development of socioemotional skills. For this inquiry, we collected data from N = 892 students (77.3% of color) participating in one of 11 programs in visual arts, music, theatre, or dance. While our analyses revealed trend-level effects for programs on growth mindset and artistic goal orientation for the sample as a whole, significant effects were observed among younger students for growth mindset and for school engagement among students with high levels of engagement prior to program participation. We discuss the implications of these findings, which, given the composition of our sample, can be generalized to low-income students of color.
