A new study conducted by Johns Hopkins University published in the journal Trends in Neuroscience and Education provides strong correlational evidence that involvement in the arts improves students’ academic outcomes and memory of learning math and science.
It is unclear whether the improved outcomes are the result of general exposure to the arts, the integration of arts into content instruction, the use of effective instructional practices, or a combination of these factors. Moreover, as a growing number of studies suggest that arts-integrated pedagogy enhances learning, few empirical studies have explicitly examined the direct effect of an arts-integrated curriculum on learning and specifically on students’ memory for non-arts academic content.