Elsevier

Early Childhood Research Quarterly

Volume 45, 4th Quarter 2018, Pages 204-214
Early Childhood Research Quarterly

The art of Head Start: Intensive arts integration associated with advantage in school readiness for economically disadvantaged children

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2017.12.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We examined the impact of arts-integrated Head Start preschool on school readiness.

  • Overall, arts-integrated Head Start related to an advantage in school readiness.

  • Arts integration related to greater gains on a school readiness composite.

  • Arts integration related to greater gains in self/social awareness.

  • Arts integration also related to greater gains in understanding texture/material.

Abstract

The present study examined the impact of intensive arts integration on school readiness for economically disadvantaged children attending Head Start preschool. Participants were 265 children, ages 3–5 years. Of these, 197 attended a fully arts-integrated Head Start, where children received daily music, dance, and visual arts classes in addition to homeroom, and 68 attended a matched comparison program that did not include arts classes. The Bracken Basic Concepts Scale, Third Edition- Receptive (BBCS-3:R) was used to measure children’s school readiness at the start and end of a year of preschool attendance. According to a repeated-measures multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA), children at the arts-integrated Head Start showed greater gains in school readiness compared to their peers at the comparison program. Univariate tests revealed that attendance at the arts-integrated preschool was associated with greater gains on a general school readiness composite as well as in specific concept areas of texture/material and self/social awareness. Findings suggest that the arts can add value to Head Start preschool. Implications concern the arts as a vehicle for equalizing educational opportunities for young, economically disadvantaged children.

Introduction

Approximately, 42% of children are growing up in poor or low-income households (U.S. Census Bureau, 2016). The results are clear. Economic hardship places children at risk for a host of difficulties in cognitive and social-emotional domains (Brooks-Gunn & Duncan, 1997; Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 2000). Head Start and related preschool programs promote positive development but fall short of equalizing educational outcomes for economically disadvantaged children (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2010). Although early childhood programs cannot be expected to erase the power of poverty, it is incumbent upon us to continue to explore how we might promote positive outcomes for children facing economic adversity. The present study examines the impact of arts-integrated preschool programming on the development of school readiness skills for economically disadvantaged children.

The idea that the arts might benefit children’s overall cognitive development is not new, but is controversial. The philosopher Nelson Goodman recognized this when he founded Harvard’s Project Zero in 1967, noting that the arts and cognition should be studied but that “zero” had been definitively established (Gardner, 2013). Fifty years later, and with considerable study by Goodman and his colleagues such as Howard Gardner, there have been meaningful developments in theory and research (Gardner, 2013), yet questions remain about the benefits of the arts for the development of non-arts competencies (Sala & Gobet, 2017). These questions are particularly important ones to address during an era in which expanding access to early childhood education often has been tied to outcomes-based assessment, and preschools have faced increasing pressure to replace music, dance, visual arts, sociodramatic play, and other creative activities with deskwork and drilling on letters, numbers, and other school readiness concepts (Reed, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2012).

Several strands of theoretical and empirical evidence suggest the potential for the arts to promote the school readiness of children at risk via economic disadvantage, and we will highlight three. The first concerns the diverse learning opportunities afforded by arts education. The second concerns the potential for the arts to promote emotional experiences that facilitate learning. The third focuses on the possibility that arts modalities such as music, dance, and visual arts train cognitive abilities that hold relevance beyond the arts. We will also highlight remaining questions regarding the role of the arts for promoting school readiness. In particular, there are questions about whether intensive arts integration can add value to already well developed programs such as Head Start and further promote the overall school readiness of economically disadvantaged children.

Human beings learn best when the body is engaged and events are registered by multiple senses (Sylwester, 1995). This may be particularly true for young children whose experience of the world is sensory in nature (Nutbrown, 2013). Gardner’s (1983) theory of multiple intelligences has recognized the importance of varied modalities for processing information, as has the widely respected Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1998). Accessibility theory suggests that a combination of verbal and nonverbal means for expressing knowledge may be particularly important for promoting the language development of students who are English language learners as well as children with the types of language delays common in poverty circumstances (Darby & Catterall, 1994; Eisner, 1998; Gregoire & Lupinetti, 2005).

Integrating the arts into preschool education may give young learners varied opportunities for engaging with school and experiencing success (Nevanen, Juvonen, & Ruismäki, 2014). Nevanen et al. (2014) gathered qualitative data from interviews with teachers and visiting artists in the Helsinki project, which involved multi-year collaborative projects in subjects like visual and environmental art, literature and drama, dance, circus art, and architecture. The researchers concluded that the varied opportunities for children to experience success increased their confidence and skill (Nevanen et al., 2014).

Additionally, the arts may enhance the cultural relevance of education for students from socioeconomic and ethnic groups whose cultures and traditions reside at the margins of standard U.S. education. Cultural relevance theory holds that the relevance of education depends on incorporating students’ prior cultural knowledge, which for many students from African, Asian, Latin, and Indigenous American backgrounds includes expression through the arts (Boykin, 1991, 1992; ; Griffin & Miller, 2007; Young, 1990). Integrating the arts may facilitate building on students’ prior cultural knowledge as well as allow students to express their individual realities, building bridges between home and school (Allison & Rehm, 2007; Bernhard, Winsler, Bleiker, Ginieniewicz, & Madigan, 2008; Hall, 2007).

Second, research suggests the arts may promote social-emotional experiences that facilitate learning, including for economically disadvantaged children (Menzer, 2015). In a prior investigation out of our lab, Brown and Sax (2013) found that children attending an arts-integrated Head Start showed greater interest, happiness, and pride in music, dance, and visual arts classes compared with regular homeroom. These children also showed greater overall incidence of positive emotions compared with peers at a Head Start that was not fully arts-integrated, and showed significantly greater growth over the course of the school year in their ability to regulate or manage emotions.

An experimental study by Lobo and Winsler (2006) also demonstrated benefits of arts programming for economically disadvantaged children. In this study, children attending a Head Start preschool were randomly assigned to an eight-week dance program or a control group with free playtime. Those in the dance program showed greater growth in terms of social competence as well as internalizing and externalizing behavior as rated by parents and teachers who were not told children’s group membership. These researchers noted the opportunities afforded by dance instruction for building self-confidence, social skills, and self-regulatory strategies.

Research with heterogeneous income samples has also demonstrated social-emotional benefits of multiple arts modalities. Multiple studies with children and young adults suggest that drawing can lead to short term mood improvement after the induction of negative mood (Dalebroux, Goldstein, & Winner, 2008; Drake & Winner, 2013). Research has suggested that acting classes may help children to develop empathy (Goldstein & Winner, 2012) and that complex sociodramatic play may enhance self-regulatory skills (Elias & Berk, 2002). Also, Winsler, Ducenne, and Koury (2011) documented an advantage in self-regulation for young children who participated in a music program compared with peers who did not participate and suggested that an increase in self-regulatory private speech might serve as one mechanism of this effect. The self-regulatory benefits of the arts may advantage children’s overall acquisition of school readiness skills as well as their specific social-emotional skill development.

Arts training may provide a mechanism for training basic cognitive abilities that undergird school success. Schellenberg’s (2005) review concluded that childhood music training generally enhances intellectual abilities. The conclusion was qualified in part because of a paucity of experimental studies. One experimental study by Schellenberg (2004) found that children participating in music lessons showed growth in IQ scores over the course of one year. Such growth could be explained by the influence of music training on executive functions such as planning, set-shifting, and inhibitory control; a hypothesis supported by some studies (Dege, Kubicek, & Schwarzer, 2011) but not all (Schellenberg, 2011). Sala and Gobet’s (2017) review noted the lack of consistent findings of positive links between music training and IQ and concluded that many positive findings may be attributable to confounding variables.

Music, dance, and visual and dramatic art forms have also been proposed to train specific non-arts competencies due to the particular skill training embedded in arts programming. Visual arts, for example, might help students to engage with and learn about school readiness concepts related to texture and material and might train symbolic representation important for literacy development (Meiners, 2005). Creative writing and storytelling undoubtedly fosters literacy development (Bernhard et al., 2008). Additionally, robust research has linked music training to phonological awareness (Anvari, Trainor, Woodside, & Levy, 2002), visual-auditory learning (Moreno, Friesen, & Bialystok, 2011), and other language and literacy skills (Corrigall & Trainor, 2011; Forgeard, Winner, Norton, & Schlaug, 2008; Rauscher & Hinton, 2011). A neuroimaging study by Hyde et al. (2009) revealed structural brain changes that may underlie music training’s links to auditory skills, and other evidence similarly supports the neurological underpinnings of music’s relationship to language skills (Strait & Kraus, 2011).

Research with children in Head Start also suggests benefits of arts programming for children’s verbal skill development. In a prior study out of our lab, Brown, Benedett, and Armistead (2010) compared receptive vocabulary for children attending a typical Head Start versus one with daily music, dance, and visual arts classes, and found the children receiving arts classes showed greater vocabulary growth across the school year. These results may have been due to the varied opportunities afforded by the arts classes for introducing and practicing vocabulary skills.

Considerable attention has focused on the arts and visual-spatial and mathematical skill development. Goldsmith et al. (2016) highlighted the connection between the visual-spatial thinking required in drawing and that required in geometric reasoning. Dow (2010) discussed the potential for dance to promote understanding of direction and position because of its focus on elements of movement, space, time, and energy, and its frequent inclusion of prompts such as “March backwards!” or “Leap over the ribbon!” Also, music has been linked to advantages in spatial-temporal and other mathematical skills, including for economically disadvantaged children (Hetland & Winner, 2001; Rauscher, 2003; Rauscher & Hinton, 2011).

In Rauscher’s (2003) study, economically disadvantaged children attending Head Start preschool were randomly assigned to receive piano, computer, or no extra instruction for 48 weeks. The music groups showed greater growth on standardized measures of spatial-temporal, visual-spatial, and arithmetic skills. Rauscher (2003) posited that this might be attributable to the part-whole or division concepts embedded in musical notes, tempo, and pitch, and a follow up study provided some support for this hypothesis: Children in Head Start preschool were randomly assigned to receive piano, singing, rhythm, or no instruction, and the rhythm group showed the greatest gains in temporal and arithmetic skills (Rauscher & Hinton, 2011).

Although some theory and research suggests the potential for arts-integrated education to provide advantages in terms of overall school readiness as well as particular skill development for economically disadvantaged children at risk, important questions remain. In general, there are more claims about the benefits of arts-integrated education than there are robust research studies to support these claims (Hetland & Winner, 2001; Sala & Gobet, 2017). Many studies have been strictly correlational, such that the demonstrated relations between arts training and academic outcomes might be attributed to selection effects (e.g., smart children are more likely to pursue music lessons; Schellenberg, 2011). Further quasi-experimental and experimental studies are needed to definitively establish the relationship between the arts and non-arts academic outcomes (Hanna, Patterson, Rollins, & Sherman, 2011; Sala & Gobet, 2017).

Questions also remain about whether the potential cognitive benefits of arts modalities such as music might be general (Schellenberg, 2004, Schellenberg, 2011), such that arts training might advantage overall school readiness, or specific (Rauscher, 2003; Rauscher & Hinton, 2011), such that the arts might provide a mechanism for teaching particular school readiness concepts. Another issue is that demonstrated relations between the arts and non-arts outcomes may be very specific to children’s level and type of engagement with the arts. Tsang and Conrad (2011) found that pitch discrimination, although correlated with phonological awareness, predicted reading ability only in children without formal music training. Also, Young, Cordes, and Winner (2014) found that arts involvement predicted academic achievement only when children had a musical instrument in their home. We need further information about the level and type of arts involvement necessary for producing cognitive benefits (Schellenberg & Winner, 2011).

Moreover, theory suggests that economically disadvantaged children at risk for school difficulties might particularly benefit from intensive arts education (Gregoire & Lupinetti, 2005; Nutbrown, 2013), and some correlational studies with older children and youth have suggested academic benefits for children from low-income as well as middle-income families (Catterall, Dumais, & Hampden-Thompson, 2012). Yet few robust studies of arts’ impact focus on young, economically disadvantaged children (Bernhard et al., 2008; Brown et al., 2010; Brown & Sax, 2013; Lobo & Winsler, 2006; Rauscher, 2003), and none of the published studies to date have employed a broad, standardized child assessment measure that taps pre-academic as well as social-emotional aspects of school readiness.

Given the risk facing economically disadvantaged children, the comparative value of arts education is an important consideration: Although intensive arts instruction may advantage particular skill development for economically disadvantaged children, other types of instruction might also offer important benefits. Schellenberg (2011) concluded that, for heterogeneous income and samples of children and youth, cognitive benefits are apparent for those who study music on top of everything else rather than instead of something else. Also, for children attending Head Start preschool, Rauscher (2003) found that, although children who received music instruction showed advantages in spatial and mathematical skills, those who received computer training showed advantages in certain verbal skills. Few studies have compared school readiness outcomes for Head Start programs that include intensive arts instruction versus more traditional ones. Understanding whether the arts can be intensively integrated into Head Start in ways that add value to typical curricular models rather than trading one set of advantages for another matters critically to policy decisions.

The present study employed a quasi-experimental design to examine the impact of intensive arts programming on the school readiness of economically disadvantaged children attending Head Start preschool. This study built on our research team’s prior investigations of intensive arts programming in relation to specific school readiness outcomes such as vocabulary (Brown et al., 2010) and emotion expression and regulation (Brown & Sax, 2013) for children attending Head Start preschool. These prior studies, as well as the current investigation, focused on the arts as integrated into Settlement Music School’s Kaleidoscope Preschool Arts Enrichment Program.

Participants in the present study included children attending Settlement’s arts-integrated Head Start and those attending a matched comparison Head Start preschool that was not fully arts-integrated. Both preschools were NAEYC-accredited and used the Creative Curriculum (Dodge & Colker, 1992), which prescribes some integration of the arts into regular homeroom classes. When Nardo, Custodero, Persellin, and Fox (2006) surveyed teachers in NAEYC-accredited preschools, a majority reported arts components such as music for a small amount of time and primarily to enrich the classroom environment. According to this survey, the limited use of the arts to promote pre-academic skill development might include a song to teach days of the week or a dance to teach following directions.

The Nardo et al. (2006) findings were consistent with how the arts were integrated into homeroom classes at Settlement preschool and the comparison site. In homeroom classes at both preschools, for example, children were observed to engage in arts activities like music, as they sang hello to their classmates during morning circle; dance, as the teacher played music while setting up snack; or drawing, as they engaged in making journals. Occasionally, the homeroom classes were observed to sing the alphabet song, or engage in another arts activity intentionally designed to promote pre-academic skill development. Primarily, however, the homeroom classes used arts components to enhance classroom activities rather than as a focus of pre-academic or artistic skill development. The arts activities comprised a small portion of the overall homeroom class time (for example 5 min of singing during a 45-min homeroom period).

Although the homeroom classes at both preschools were similar in their inclusion of the arts, Settlement’s preschool was unique in its additional inclusion of multiple music, dance, and visual arts classes in the daily schedule. Content and skill development was linked and repeated across the homeroom and arts classes, which were used to promote the development of not only artistic skills, but also other school readiness competencies, in typical early learning domains such as language, literacy, mathematics, and social/cultural learning. Like most Head Starts, Settlement and the comparison site both organized instruction around early learning themes. Settlement was unique, however, in teaching children about these themes not only via homeroom but also via music, dance, and visual arts classes.

For the theme of “Self Expression,” a typical Head Start might give children opportunities in homeroom to practice labeling facial expressions of emotions as well as express themselves and change their emotional state by creating journals. At Settlement, children received additional opportunities to explore the theme in arts classes. The visual arts class allowed children to express themselves through media such as painting or collage, for example, and to discuss how pieces of visual art made them feel. In music, children used their voices and other instruments to reproduce sounds that humans and other animals make to express emotions. Also, in dance, children used creative movement to perform different emotions for their classmates to identify. In the various arts classes, children participated in guided exploration of how to use sound, movement, and visual media, respectively, to express and change their emotional state.

Also in common with most Head Starts, Settlement incorporated varied cultural traditions and provided opportunities for skill development in core early childhood domains of math, science, language, literacy, and social and cultural learning. Again, however, Settlement was unique in using multiple arts as well as homeroom classes to accomplish these goals. In autumn, Indian cultural traditions often are introduced as children learn about Diwali, the “Festival of Lights.” At Settlement, children developed language and literacy skills such as vocabulary, by learning Hindi words in early learning classes; writing prerequisites, by copying Indian mandala designs in visual arts; and reading prerequisites, by following Indian song-stories in music and dance, singing and moving in response to pictorial cues. To develop math skills, children learned about patterns by repeating their mandala designs with variation in visual arts, as well as clapping and moving to the beat in music and dance. As such, core skills are practiced through multiple modes.

The present quasi-experimental study was designed to investigate the impact of intensive arts integration on the school readiness of young children attending Head Start preschool. We examined school readiness at the start and end of a year of Head Start preschool at Settlement’s arts-integrated program versus the matched comparison site that was not fully arts-integrated. We used the Bracken Basic Concepts Scale (BBCS-3:R; Bracken, 2006) to measure school readiness. This test is widely used to measure school readiness outcomes including in Head Start preschools and provides a general school readiness composite score that indexes knowledge of core concepts of colors, letters, numbers, shapes, and sizes, as well as subtest scores tapping additional knowledge of direction/position, self/social awareness, texture/material, quantity, and time/sequence. We controlled for key demographic variables of child age, gender, racial/ethnic minority status, and family income-to-needs, which hold demonstrated relations to school readiness outcomes. We hypothesized that, compared with children at the typical Head Start, children attending Settlement’s arts-integrated preschool would show greater growth over the course of the school year on the general and specific indicators of school readiness.

Section snippets

Participants

This study included 265 participants and their primary caregivers. The participants were children who attended one of two Head Start preschools in a large city on the East Coast of the United States in one of three cohorts. The first cohort attended the preschools during the 2009–2010 school year, the second, during the 2010–2011 school year, and the third, during the 2011–2012 school year. The first of these cohorts was also included in our lab’s prior published study of arts-integrated

Results

Table 1 shows correlations among demographic and school readiness variables and Table 2, Table 3 show respective means and standard deviations by preschool type. To evaluate demographic differences between the preschools, we used chi-square analyses for the dichotomous variables of child gender (male = 1), race/ethnicity (minority group member = 1), and race/ethnicity subcategories (e.g., Black/African American = 1) and independent samples t-tests for child age and family income-to-needs (see

Discussion

The present study examined the impact of intensive, arts-integrated programming on the development of school readiness skills for economically disadvantaged children attending Head Start preschool. Several lines of reasoning suggest the potential for arts-integrated programming to offer advantages. The varied opportunities for learning provided by the arts may be particularly relevant for young learners (Nutbrown, 2013), as well as for English language learners and children with poverty-related

References (77)

  • B.A. Allen et al.

    The influence of contextual factors on Afro-American and Euro-American children's performance: Effects of movement opportunity and music

    International Journal of Psychology

    (1991)
  • B.A. Allen et al.

    African American children and the educational process: Alleviating cultural discontinuity through perceptive pedagogy

    School Psychology Review

    (1992)
  • B.N. Allison et al.

    Effective teaching strategies for middle school learners in multicultural, multilingual classrooms

    Middle School Journal

    (2007)
  • A. Ansari et al.

    Montessori public school pre-K programs and the school readiness of low-income Black and Latino children

    Journal of Educational Psychology

    (2014)
  • P.E. Barton

    Parsing the achievement gap: Baselines for tracking progress

    (2003)
  • J.K. Bernhard et al.

    Read my story! Using the early authors program to promote early literacy among diverse, urban preschool children in poverty

    Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk

    (2008)
  • B.A. Bracken

    Bracken basic concept scale-third edition: Receptive (BBCS-3:R)

    (2006)
  • J. Brooks-Gunn et al.

    The effects of poverty on children

    The Future of Children

    (1997)
  • J. Brooks-Gunn et al.

    The contribution of parenting to ethnic and racial gaps in school readiness

    The Future of Children

    (2005)
  • J. Brooks-Gunn et al.

    The black-white test score gap in young children: Contributions of test and family characteristics

    Applied Developmental Science

    (2003)
  • J. Brooks-Gunn

    Do you believe in magic? What we can expect from early childhood intervention programs

    (2000)
  • J.S. Catterall et al.

    The arts and achievement in at-risk youth: Findings from four longitudinal databases

    (2012)
  • K.A. Corrigall et al.

    Associations between length of music training and reading skills in children

    Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal

    (2011)
  • E. Costa-Giomi

    The effects of three years of piano instruction of children’s cognitive development

    Journal of Research in Music Education

    (1999)
  • A. Dalebroux et al.

    Short term mood repair through art-making: Positive emotion is more effective than venting

    Motivation and Emotion

    (2008)
  • J.T. Darby et al.

    The fourth R: The arts and learning

    Teachers College Record

    (1994)
  • F. Dege et al.

    Music lessons and intelligence: A relation mediated by executive functions

    Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal

    (2011)
  • D.T. Dodge et al.

    Creative curriculum for early childhood

    (1992)
  • C.B. Dow

    Young children and movement: The power of creative dance

    YC: Young Children

    (2010)
  • J.E. Drake et al.

    How children use drawing to regulate their emotions

    Cognition & Emotion

    (2013)
  • G. Duncan et al.

    Family poverty, welfare reform, and child development

    Child Development

    (2000)
  • A. Eckhoff

    Art experiments: Introducing an artist-in-residence programme in early childhood education

    Early Child Development and Care

    (2011)
  • C. Edwards et al.

    Hundred languages of children: The Reggio Emilia approach—Advanced reflections

    (1998)
  • E.W. Eisner

    Does experience in the arts boost academic achievement?

    Clearing House

    (1998)
  • M. Forgeard et al.

    Practicing a musical instrument in childhood is associated with enhanced verbal ability and nonverbal reasoning

    PLoS One

    (2008)
  • H. Gardner

    Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences

    (1983)
  • Gardner, H. (2013, September, 10). Harvard Project Zero: A Personal History. Retrieved from...
  • L.T. Goldsmith et al.

    Visual-spatial thinking ingeometry and the visual arts

    Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts

    (2016)
  • This project was supported in part by an award from the Research: Art Works program at the National Endowment for the Arts: Grant #13-3800-7004. Additional support was provided by the West Chester University College of Arts and Sciences and Department of Psychology. We wish to thank the Head Start families, teachers, staff, and administrators who contributed to this research, and the student research assistants from the West Chester University Early Childhood Cognition and Emotions Lab (ECCEL). The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not represent the views of the Office of Research & Analysis or the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information included in this report and is not responsible for any consequence of its use.

    View full text