Learning Through Art - LTA and Literacy Skills

LTA and Literacy Skills

“Excellence in teaching is a hallmark of the Guggenheim and the evaluation findings confirm what we have intuitively known—that our dynamic approach to viewing, discussing, and creating works of art with youth improves their ability to think and read,” - Kim Kanatani, Director of Education, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

In 2006, results of a three year study confirmed fundamental literacy skills were developed through participation in inquiry with art. The study, Teaching Literacy Through Art, was administered by the LTA program, conducted by Randi Korn & Associates, and funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The study examined groups of third graders at P.S. 148 in Queens, and P.S. 86 in the Bronx. Along with classroom discussion of texts and visual documents, for the purposes of this study students were asked to discuss the painting The Artist and His Mother by Arshile Gorky (1926), and an excerpt from Cynthia Kabohata's 2004 book Kira-Kira. The study found that the third grade students who participated in the LTA program and had ample practice talking critically about works of art using inquiry, used more words to express themselves and demonstrated higher achievement in six categories of literacy and critical-thinking skills than their peers who had no experience with inquiry and visual documents. Categories of improved literacy skills were: thorough description, extended focus, hypothesizing, evidential reasoning, providing multiple interpretations, and building schema.

These improvements in critical-thinking skills aid classroom teachers in meeting New York State English Language Arts Learning Standards, and prove that skills learned while creating meaning with a visual document are transferable to students' capabilities in navigating meaning with a written text. For many students who have trouble decoding text, talking critically about a visual text provides a more accessible entryway to developing these important critical-thinking skills necessary in becoming an active reader of written texts.

However, while students who participated in LTA demonstrated improved critical-thinking and literacy skills inside the classroom and in interviews with researchers, scores on the New York City English Language Arts exam were not significantly different from the control group. This could perhaps be because the exam was written, whereas inquiry with artwork and data collected for research was done orally, through class discussion and interviews. Oral evaluations were chosen to be used in the study, because researchers wanted to evaluate students' language skills when thinking critically about a work of art or a text, as opposed to students' reading or writing ability.