Samantha Thomas is a happy well-adjusted young teenager and she credits her confidence with playing the guitar.

The 13-year-old musician has been playing since she was 9 and has even picked up the clarinet pretty easily and plays in the band at Cario Middle School.

“I have learned a sense of responsibility – how to care for my instrument, how to learn music and how to take care of everyone else in the band – and reading music is always a good thing to have in your life.”

Playing music has helped her self-esteem as well. She’s met new friends with the same interests and gets good grades in school, which she attributes to her involvement with the arts.

“It’s 100 percent a good choice. I see that a lot of people that play music in my school have done so much better on academics and you get to meet new friends who have the same tastes and what you like to do. And you get to share stories about things that happened.”

The research leans toward this idea as well. Students who are exposed to arts simply do better in school. Michael Sikes, senior associate for research and policy at the Arts Education Partnership, a Washington-based nonprofit, agrees. The organization is currently creating a database of information and research related to arts education.

“In the greater category of academic success … we have some fairly strong evidence that arts education makes a big difference for kids. That the ones that do have arts education do tend to go on and succeed more academically.

“And the more studies we get that substantiate the more the case becomes clear,” Sikes says.

James Catterall, professor of education at the University of California at Los Angeles, has extensively researched the benefits of arts education. His study “Doing Well and Doing Good by Doing Art” spanned a 12-year period and included 12,000 students. He found students who had a rich arts education experience had higher SAT scores, more of them finished high school and significantly more of them went to college.

Focus on Music

Tom Noren, owner of Childbloom Guitar, teaches music at various schools in the Lowcountry. He says the real benefit of exposure to arts comes from “the concrete knowledge that if you practice something you will get better at it.”

Students might study for a test and 
not get a good grade, but with music it 
is different.

“If you’re having trouble learning something in music and you break it down to its simplest forms you’re going to get better at it,” Noren says. “You’ve learned strategies and techniques to help you learn what you’re having difficulty with.”

Students who play an instrument learn skills that can translate to their study habits as well, including how to manage their time studying or practicing.

“What I focus on is ‘how do you put in the time efficiently?’ It’s smart practicing as opposed to just putting in time, and I think that skill can translate into their schoolwork and help the focus and help them become better students.”

He says learning to play music helps with attention issues as well.

“Just being able to focus on one thing at a time as opposed to getting everything all mixed up in your mind. You concentrate on one thing, get better at it and go onto the other thing.”

The Physical

Dance helps children become more in tune with their own bodies by requiring them to tune into their physique and make things happen.

“You may have kids that aren’t quite as dexterous, their body doesn’t move as easily or as well, and this helps to teach them about their bodies,” says Barbara Musgrove, owner and director of Dance Explosion. “They have to really zone into their own muscular physique.”

It also helps kids get off the couch and moving around.

“A lot of kids are in the technical age and they sit at home play games on the computer or on their Xboxes, and they’re not being physical, which in turn creates a lot of obesity in the younger kids.”

Musgrove says she’s seen amazing transformations in some of her students. Their confidence and self-esteem have increased tremendously.

“I’ve found that many kids that come to me are very shy and withdrawn, and after a few months of being in class they come out of it.”

They learn to focus on what they are doing and not worry about an audience – knowing that people are watching them goes away.

Express yourself

Martha Criscuolo, owner of earthArt Pottery & Art Studio, has been teaching children art for eight years. She believes exposing children to art teaches two things – how to express themselves and also how to accept other’s viewpoints in a nonthreatening way.

“It shows them that people really need a way to express our feelings, our thoughts, our moods, and that expression is not only necessary, but it’s healthy. It’s also unique to the individual. So they’re thinking all these thoughts inside them, and maybe they’re not sure how to express them yet … then they go to an art museum and say, ‘oh my, that person was angry or that person 
was happy.’”

Art history can also affect a student’s critical-thinking skills, which then transfers into reading comprehension, writing and problem solving in math and science.

“For example, you see a painting and since the artist isn’t standing there explaining it, the viewer has to interpret, analyze and organize what they see into a story or an idea. They sort through the colors, shapes or objects in the narrative in much the same way as when reading.

“In 2-D art you’ve got to deal with creating a successful composition, which requires balance. You make choices about art media, colors and shapes. In 3-D art you’ve the added problem of construction. Does it stand in the way you expect it to? How can you achieve symmetry? How can you support weight without adding bulk?”

And these are all problems engineers, architects, chefs, scientists take on every day. Studying art also brings to life historical events in a vibrant way.

“And when we have third-graders come to the Gibbes Art Museum after they’ve studied the Civil War, they really enjoy pointing out the Civil War paintings. 
They can recognize the battle sites and the characters. It reinforces what they’ve learned and adds onto the story in their mind. The paintings can really illustrate what the world looked like in a certain era the kids might be studying.”

A bright future

“Arts education is important to every kid, but we’re finding it is especially important to kids who are at-risk – including ethnic minority kids and kids who are marginalized … who are language minority, English-language learners,” Sikes says. “They are often the ones who, through an arts program, manage to stay in school and succeed. The arts are a huge equity issue. It just seems to be, without saying the arts are the magic bullet, but they are certainly one of them, to keeping kids in school and helping them toward the pathway toward success.”

He cites the “imaginative actuality study” where researchers studied thousands of students and found that those who had arts education began to talk about the future in a different way.

“The idea that arts can unlock students’ ability to imagine a future that is different from the present is huge. I think when students imagine that they can succeed they are more likely to than if they don’t believe they can.

“We see it over and over again. Students that are involved in arts education start to imagine a future that’s exciting to them and of possibilities they’d never dreamt of before.”

To learn more about the research being conducted and collected about arts and education visit www.aep-arts.org.