Arts in Education: A Systematic Review of Competency Outcomes in Quasi-Experimental and Experimental Studies

24 articles reporting 26 evaluation studies across music, drama, dance and visual arts

Arts education programmes for children and adolescents evaluated with experimental or quasi-experimental designs

A systematic review restricted to (quasi-)experimental designs across all four arts domains, which makes it the best available census of what has actually been tested. Included in this archive for a structural finding rather than an effect size: of 26 evaluation studies across the whole of arts education, exactly ONE concerned visual arts, and it did not measure artistic skill.

Across 26 evaluation studies the review finds the field thin: "sufficiently powered (quasi-)experimental studies with pre-test post-test designs evaluating arts education are sparse." The single VISUAL ARTS study in the entire review was Catterall and Peppler (2007), n = 179 third graders, quasi-experimental with an untreated control over 20-30 weeks, and its outcomes were self-efficacy, self-concept, success attributions, worldviews and self-reported creativity - not drawing, composition or any measure of art-making skill. Music and drama account for most of the remaining corpus.

Not addressed; the review covers designs of mixed quality, most of them quasi-experimental with self-selected participation.

Not applicable to a systematic review. Its structural finding - that visual arts is almost unrepresented in the experimental literature - is corroborated independently by the absence of any art-skill outcome in the largest arts-education randomised trial (Houston) and by the American Institutes for Research ESSA review, in which 34 of 44 arts-integration interventions had only a rationale behind them.