STEAM’s Engine for Powering the Arts
Findings from neuroscience for using arts instruction to bolster students’ academic skills
By David A. Sousa/School Administrator, December 2015


Using about $6,000 in outside grant money, a K-8 school in Palm Beach County, Fla., expanded its instruction in the subjects of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But after three years, the added attention and resources for the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and math) wasn’t making a difference in student achievement.

Elementary school students use personal artifacts and family stories in a multimodal “Who I Am” storytelling project at The School of Columbia University in New York City. (Photo by James Haywood Rolling Jr., used with permission of the National Art Education Association)
“Standardized test scores were flat, and science instruction was primarily teacher talk,” the frustrated principal said of the lack of student progress.

The additional instructional time in STEM had been made possible by reducing course time in music and the visual arts and eliminating dance and drama. “STEM wasn’t working and we really missed the arts. We needed to try a new approach, and that’s why we decided to implement STEAM,” she said. STEAM adds an “A” for arts integration into STEM instruction.

Funding Trade-Offs

During the opening years of the 21st century, it was clear our country needed to produce more scientists and engineers to compete in a global market and to solve the complex societal issues facing us.

An act of Congress in 2007 authorized funding for STEM initiatives from kindergarten through graduate school. Elementary and middle schools were the ripe funding targets because instruction in science and math was uneven at those levels and often taught by teachers who were not certified in those fields. However, with no change in the length of the school day or the school year, more instruction in the STEM areas meant less instruction in other areas.

Hardest hit was the arts. Although data from the National Center for Education Statistics show the number of elementary schools teaching the arts has declined only gradually in recent years, the amount of instructional time has dropped dramatically. Providing more instruction for STEM may not account for all of the lost time for the arts, but school administrators tell me it is a major factor. Do they realize, however, they are reducing art instruction at the elementary level where it can have its greatest impact on the developing brain?
 
A project using found materials teaches 4th and 5th graders in Florida about flotation, water density and even the math behind calculating miles per hour in wind-propelled movement. (Photo by Tom Pilecki)


This might almost be a worthwhile trade-off — that is, more STEM, less art — if it resulted in significant student improvement in mathematics and science. But the National Assessment of Educational Progress and international test scores for 8th-grade students in both subjects in recent years remain flat. Frankly, the Next Generation Science Standards, developed under the auspices of the National Research Council, will do little to improve student learning unless STEM instruction concentrates more on creative and real-world problem solving — in other words, what working scientists, engineers and mathematicians really do. The irony here is that increased instruction in STEM courses has squeezed out the very subjects that promote creativity, the arts. What can we do about it?

Neuroscience’s Role

You may have heard of a new field of study called educational neuroscience that examines how neuroscientific findings can affect the curricular, instructional and assessment decisions of educators. Some of these findings provide insights into how the arts enhance mental skills that can improve learning in the STEM subjects.

Here are a few important school-based applications of the research findings that support integrating the arts in STEM to produce STEAM.

» Working in the arts enhances spatial skills.

These skills help students imagine how an object appears when rotated in their heads and to use mental images to see a problem in novel ways. They allow students to solve spatial problems involving navigation in space, to recognize scenes and faces, to identify fine details, to observe accurately and to answer questions such as “How does it move?” Geodesic domes can describe soccer balls and architectural buildings, as well as the structure of viruses and some recently discovered enormous and complex molecules. Spatial skills normally are not taught in science courses, but are at home in drama, dance, music and painting.

» Working in the arts enhances attention and engagement.

Teachers know how difficult it is to get students’ attention and to engage them in classwork when they have so many other distractions from technology. Students have little practice in sustained attention. The arts demand focus, whether it is deciding on the components in a painting or mapping out the moves in a dance. They also are completely hands-on, so engagement is rarely an issue.

» Working in the arts enhances working and long-term memory systems.

Research studies are showing that the capacity of working (temporary) memory in young people seems to be declining, probably due to their increasing reliance on digital devices to remember information they once memorized. But think of the memory resources required for a student to memorize a piano selection, a character’s lines in a play or the sequence of movements for a dance recital. Scientists and mathematicians need to have good temporary and permanent memory skills to work efficiently as well as creatively.

» Working in the arts enhances persistence.

Fast-paced technology is producing a generation of digital natives who expect immediate gratification or they move on to another diversion. Artistic endeavors seldom work out on the first try, and neither do scientific experiments. Recall Thomas Edison’s persistence in searching for a workable light-bulb filament. “I haven’t failed,” he said. “I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Students need to get involved in tasks that require the determination to see a project through to its finish, be it artistic or scientific.

» Working in the arts encourages students to reflect and self-evaluate.

This happens by asking students to analyze, judge and rework their projects. Success comes with effort, rethinking and perseverance. Albert Einstein worked for six years to develop his theory of relativity, and James Dyson made more than 5,000 design prototypes over five years before finding the successful dust-bag-free technology for his vacuum cleaner.

» Working in the arts helps students see the value of the STEM subjects to other disciplines and society.

They see how geometry designed the ancient pyramids, how bridges can be both functional and aesthetic, and how computer engineers code messages to the frequencies of a specific song to prevent interception of the message unless the decoder knows the song. They discover that genetic researchers convert complex data into musical notation to analyze data, such as decoding the sequence of genes in a chromosome.

Scientists, engineers and mathematicians know the arts are vital to their success and use skills borrowed from the arts as scientific tools.

Arts Integration

After that school in Palm Beach County had participated in a yearlong professional development program designed to help science, math and arts teachers work together, a survey asked them for their frank appraisal of the initiative and of their students’ progress with STEAM. The findings indicated they appreciated the value of collaborating with teachers they would not have worked with otherwise. They felt the curriculum became more authentic, hands-on and project-based and that it raised their own expectations for their students’ achievement.

In regards to the impact on their students, the teachers remarked how students now have a greater cognitive and emotional investment in their classes, that they work more diligently and learn from each other and that the frequent cooperative learning groups have turned their classrooms into learning communities that appreciate both the arts and the sciences.

Furthermore, the teachers reported their assessments of student learning were more thoughtful and varied, and they documented improvement in student achievement and engagement. Other schools that have added the arts to their STEM initiative report similar findings.

Further Restoration

Whether it is arts education or arts integration, well-designed arts experiences, especially at the elementary and middle school levels, produce positive academic and social effects as well as aid in the development of critical academic skills, basic and advanced literacy and numeracy.

In January 2013, Congress established the Congressional STEAM Caucus, whose aim is to “recognize the benefits of both the arts and sciences — and their intersections — to our country’s future generations.” The caucus has more than 60 members. Whether this congressional interest will translate into action and, more importantly, funding for STEAM, remains to be seen.

In the meantime, school administrators can take advantage of STEAM conferences and Internet sites that are appearing with frequency as a means for building up K-8 arts education programs. STEAM is an engine on the move, and it’s time to come aboard. Our future as a nation of creative people is at stake.


David Sousa, a former superintendent, is a consultant on educational neuroscience in Palm Beach, Fla. E-mail: davidsnj@aol.com



Additional Resources
Author David Sousa suggests these information resources relating to the STEM to STEAM Initiative: