Abstract
There is persuasive evidence that participation in the arts can have a powerful impact on achievement in other areas of the curriculum and on student wellbeing. We gained a positive view of what is possible in research commissioned by The Song Room (TSR). TSR is a non-profit organisation that provides free music and arts-based programs for children in disadvantaged and other high-need settings. Researchers examined the performance of students in 10 schools in highly disadvantaged settings in Western Sydney, within a quasi-experimental model with three groups of schools (1) longer-term TSR – 12–18 months (2) initial TSR – 6 months and (3) non-participating – control. The schools were a matched set; they scored roughly the same on the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA). Students in eight schools completed the Social-Emotional Wellbeing (SEW) survey designed and validated at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). Students in TSR programs outperformed students in non-TSR schools in school achievement tests and in NAPLAN tests (Caldwell, B., & Vaughan, T. (2012). Transforming literacy through the Arts. London: Routledge). The percentage of students absent on a day when TSR programs were offered was higher in non-TSR schools than in TSR schools. The gain in achievement in reading is approximately 1 year which is a larger effect than achieved in more sharply focused interventions. A higher proportion of students in TSR programs were at the highest levels of SEW and resilience than their counterparts in non-TSR schools. While caution must always be exercised in drawing cause-and-effect relationships, these differences in comparisons in matched sets of schools were statistically significant. Moreover, the longer the students were in TSR programs the greater the differences. The findings were to some extent unexpected because TSR programs ran for just one hour on one day in the week, but they are consistent with what has been found in other nations for students in similar settings.
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Vaughan, T., Caldwell, B. (2014). Improving Literacy Through the Arts. In: Barton, G. (eds) Literacy in the Arts. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04846-8_12
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