Arkansas study finds positive impact of art museum field trips |
On Board Online • March 10, 2014
By Paul Heiser
Senior Research Analyst
Long before anyone began talking about “project-based learning,” there were field trips. But, are they tangential to the learning experience, or integral to it?
Research on the effectiveness of school field trips has been slim. However, the Winter 2014 issue of Education Next presents what the publication calls the first large-scale randomized-control trial to study the benefits of school field trips.
Led by Jay Greene, a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, a research team randomly assigned students to take a one-hour tour of an Arkansas art museum – the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened in 2011.
With an endowment of more than $800 million, the museum is able to use a portion to cover all of the expenses associated with school tours, including the cost of bus rides, admission, lunch, and substitute teachers to cover for teachers who accompany students on the tour.
During the first two semesters of the school tour program, the museum received 525 applications from school groups representing 38,347 K-12 students.
Researchers combed through the applications to identify pairs of school groups that were demographically similar. Within each pair, applicant groups were randomly assigned to either receive a tour that semester (the treatment group) or not (the control group).
Students in the treatment group typically viewed and discussed five paintings. Museum educators provided a brief description of each painting and named the work and the artist. They facilitated discussions of the paintings and provided additional information only when students asked.
Surveys were administered to 10,912 students and 489 teachers at 123 different schools an average of three weeks after the treatment group received their tours. The student surveys included multiple items assessing knowledge about art as well as measures of critical thinking, historical empathy, tolerance, and sustained interest in visiting art museums.
Compared to the control group, the students who visited the art museum scored higher on measures of:
Critical thinking. Critical-thinking skills were measured by asking all third- through 12th-graders to write short essays regarding a painting they had not previously seen describing what they thought was going on in the painting and why. Overall, students in the treatment group significantly improved their ability to think critically about art relative to the control group. The benefit was even greater for minority students and those from high-poverty schools.
Tolerance. Tolerance measured the degree to which students could appreciate hearing views different from their own. To measure tolerance, students were asked on surveys to express their level of agreement or disagreement with statements such as, “I appreciate hearing views different from my own” and “I think people can have different opinions about the same thing.” Overall, receiving a school tour of an art museum increased student tolerance. As with critical thinking, the benefits are much larger for poorer and minority students.
Historical empathy. Historical empathy is the ability to understand and appreciate what life was like for people who lived in a different time and place. To measure historical empathy, students were asked on surveys to express their level of agreement or disagreement with statements such as “I can imagine what life was like for people 100 years ago.” Students who went on a tour of Crystal Bridges scored higher.
Unsurprisingly, students who received museum tours were more likely to take advantage of coupons distributed to all students inviting them to a free special exhibit than students who did not take the tour. Redeemed coupons were collected to compare the number of control and treatment group students who took advantage of the exhibit.
Researchers also found that students who received a tour of the museum were able to recall details about the paintings they had seen at high rates. For example, 88 percent of the students who saw the Eastman Johnson painting At the Camp – Spinning Yarns and Whittling knew when surveyed weeks later that the painting depicts abolitionists making maple syrup to undermine the sugar industry, which relied on slave labor.
Read the study at http://educationnext.org/the-educational-value-of-field-trips/.