The Detroit Institute of Arts’s Woodward entrance. (Image courtesy the Detroit Institute of Arts)

After a two-year battle, a federal ruling to approve Detroit’s bankruptcy plan brought to an end the threat to auction off the Detroit Institute of Arts’s collection. The plan includes the “grand bargain,” an $800 million deal that partly consists of a $366 million investment from the Ford Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Knight Foundation, and other heavy-hitters. In the bargain, DIA supporters are providing funding to save Detroit’s public pensions, with the caveat that DIA be administered by an independent charitable trust, and not by the City of Detroit, which has owned the museum since 1919. While all hail these developments as positive, DIA still has a tough road to financial stability ahead. As it looks to shore up its finances and secure its future by raising its endowment to $400 million, DIA faces hefty legal bills incurred during the bankruptcy battle, and the daunting task of fundraising from donors whose pockets may have been emptied into the grand bargain. Regardless of what the future holds, the foundations will be keeping a close eye on their investment–the Knight Foundation’s Dennis Scholl has been appointed as an observer of DIA’s board.

Publisher Hachette Wins the Right to Set E-Book Prices from Amazon: In a multi-year agreement, “Big Five” publisher Hachette won the right to set prices for e-books from Amazon, which had attempted to pressure the company to price all e-books at $9.99. The retail giant suffered in the court of public opinion for its strongarm negotiation tactics, including long shipping delays of Hachette books, disallowing advance sales, and steering customers to similar books by other publishers. Some authors are calling for Amazon to be investigated on anti-trust grounds; at the same time, Amazon has questioned the need for traditional publishing houses in the digital era. While all sides seem to be breathing a sigh of relief over the deal, it seems clear that the fight isn’t over–publishers have long had a difficult relationship with digital retailers, and observers are think the next negotiation may be just as acrimonious.

Mid-Term Elections Offer Mixed Results for the Arts: In case you were living under a rock last month, we had some elections and the Democrats lost their shirts. So what does that mean for the arts? With the Republican-majority Congress, Americans for the Arts forecasts the passage of a comprehensive tax reform bill, which will likely impact charitable giving rules. The chairship of the subcommittee that oversees funding for the Arts in Education will change, while Representative Ken Calvert (R-CA) will continue to govern the subcommittee that controls the National Endowment for the Arts budget. Barry Hessenius predicts a possible attack on the NEA’s budget, given its symbolic weight for some in Congress, and recommends that arts leaders work to build stronger relationships with our elected officials. Meanwhile, at the state level, arts-friendly candidates suffered losses in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland. In better news, Rhode Island passed a ballot referendum providing $35 million in bonds to renovate arts facilities in the state, and pro-arts measures passed in Palm Beach County, Salt Lake City, Scottsdale (AZ), and Middlesex County (NJ).

Three Foundations Purchase Pittsburgh’s August Wilson Center: The embattled August Wilson Center for African American Culture now rests in the hands of three foundations, which purchased it for $7.9 million from Dollar Bank, its mortgage holder. The Pittsburgh Foundation, Heinz Endowments, and Richard King Mellon Foundation had attempted to close on an $8.49 million deal by October 31, but the sale was torpedoed when a creditor appealed an earlier $200,000 judgment in the Pennsylvania Superior Court, and the foundations refused to proceed until the debt was settled. Dollar Bank was forced to move ahead with a foreclosure auction on November 3, which cleared the Center of its debt and allowed the foundations to complete their purchase.The Center plans to re-open in 2015 under new nonprofit leadership and will continue its mission as a focal point for African American arts and culture.

Obama Says the Internet Should Be Treated as a Public Utility: Net neutrality supporters got an unexpected boost from President Obama this November. The White House released a plan recommending that the Federal Communications Commission reclassify Internet broadband as a public utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, which proponents argue would give the FCC the increased regulatory power necessary to protect net neutrality. The president seems to agree with this line of thinking — his administration’s plan also rejects the FCC’s proposed rules to allow for paid prioritization of Internet traffic. Just after the President’s announcement, though, FCC Chairman (and Obama appointee) Tom Wheeler stated that he favored a different approach, one friendlier to the concerns of large Internet service providers like Comcast, AT&T, and Time Warner. The Washington Post speculates that Obama’s announcement may merely represent shrewd political positioning, since if the FCC enacts strong rules, and the Republican Congress votes to overturn them, a presidential veto would put Obama and the Democrats squarely in the camp of millions of voters who have asked the FCC for powerful net neutrality protections.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• Indonesia has named the U.S.-educated Anies Baswedan as the new Minister of Culture and Elementary and Secondary Education.
• The NEA’s Director of Folk and Traditional Arts Barry Bergey will retire after 29 years of service.
• Chorus America is seeking a new President and CEO. Posted November 22, closing date December 19.
• Kansas City’s Charlotte Street Foundation is looking for a new Director of Artists’ Programs. Posted October 29, no closing date.
• The Foundation Center is hiring for a Director of Community Foundation Services position. Posted November 4, no closing date.
• The Barr Foundation seeks an Arts and Culture Program Assistant. Posted November 20, no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• A study by the U.S. Trust finds a big bump in charitable giving among wealthy donors in 2014, and projects further growth.
• New research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that nonprofit employment rose during the recession.
• The BFAMFAPhD collective published Artists Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists, which asserts that “the fantasy of future earnings in the arts cannot justify the high cost of degrees.”
• The researchers behind the Crystal Bridges field trip experiment that we reported on back in October have released another study, this time focused on high-quality theater productions.
• A report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture looks at how well rural areas with a higher proportion of “creative class” workers fared during the recession.
• Suby Raman takes a deep dive into gender representation in America’s top orchestras.
• New research from Italy indicates that those with a need for “cognitive closure” are less likely to appreciate abstract art.

Art Appreciation – by Flickr user Dusty J, Creative Commons license

Large-scale, randomized-control studies – the gold standard of science, regarded as the best way to demonstrate that one thing actually causes another – are extremely rare in the arts education field, given ethical restrictions on experimenting on kids and the subjectivity of so many things related to the arts. So when researchers working with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art announced the results of such a study last fall, the art and mainstream media all rightly sat up and took notice. “Art Makes You Smart,” declared the New York Times headline, barely resisting an exclamation point and, perhaps inevitably, getting the findings wrong – though the enthusiasm for a thoughtfully designed study is certainly justified.

Crystal Bridges is an ambitious new museum of five centuries of American art located in Bentonville, Arkansas and funded primarily by Alice Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune. When the museum opened in 2011, it invited elementary schools in the area to apply for all-expenses-paid class field trips to the museum, including structured tours focusing on five paintings and an hour’s worth of instructional materials for classroom use by the teachers. All of the eligible schools were given trips – but they were assigned by lottery to time slots over the course of a year, which gave University of Arkansas scholars Jay P. Greene, Brian Kisida, and Daniel H. Bowen a top-shelf research opportunity. They gave the same assessment of cognitive and interpersonal skills to two groups of students: one that had already taken their field trips, and another that would take their field trips the following semester. By matching similar groups to one another and using regression analysis to control for variables like demographics and poverty, Greene and company were able to isolate the effect of the visits more rigorously than is usually possible, and for a population of thousands of students.

So what good does a field trip to an art museum do? Researchers catalogued a range of benefits for those who went, ranging from critical thinking skills to measures of tolerance and “historical empathy,” but perhaps the most striking finding is how magnified those benefits were across the board for children from schools in rural areas and serving low-income populations, with effect sizes double or triple those of other students. In fact, most of the positive impact from these field trips accrued to students who had never been to Crystal Bridges before, whereas “much smaller or null effects” were observed in relatively more privileged students who presumably have easier access to enriching experiences like this one.

The report’s strongest finding suggests that it boosts attentiveness to visual detail, at least for a little while. As part of the assessment, students in both treatment and control groups were shown this rather eerie painting, which they hadn’t been exposed to as part of the study, and asked to write about what they thought was going on. Their essays were scored independently by two researchers for evidence of critical thinking using a method designed by scholars at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; basically, the readers added up instances of elements like “observing,” “interpreting,” “evaluating,” and “flexible thinking.”

For rural and poor students in particular, the field trip was correlated with higher critical thinking scores, and the increase was largely driven by more instances of “observing,” meaning that these kids cited more details in their analyses of the painting. The researchers bill this effect bluntly as enhanced critical thinking, but their other findings, which were less pronounced, suggest that something more specific may be going on. Students who had visited the museum were also more likely to try to imagine what people depicted in art were thinking (part of the authors’ measure of “historical empathy”) and less likely to want to censor anti-American art (“tolerance”). At least for a few weeks after visiting, when the assessments were administered, museums seem to encourage students to take art on its own terms: they look more closely; enter the world of a painting more fully; and suspend their prejudices more effectively. This is the state of mind that makes critical thinking – not to mention understanding and appreciation of alternative viewpoints – possible.

And from all appearances, kids love it. Not only were students who had been on a field trip more likely to say that they find art museums interesting and fun, they actually acted on this belief. All of the students were given coupons to attend a special exhibition at the museum with their families for free in the six months following the study; having visited with their class made them 18% more likely to take advantage.

Crystal Bridges now has a $10 million endowment for school visits. Rigorous studies along these lines would be a worthwhile use for what would amount to a very modest portion of the funding that this and other museums set aside for arts education. Art may or may not make us smart, but research can certainly make us smarter.

(Read our full capsule review of “The Educational Value of Field Trips” in Createquity Insider.)

Author(s): Jay P. Greene, Brian Kisida and Daniel H. Bowen (“Educational Value of Field Trips”); Jay P. Greene and Brian Kisida (“Supplemental Study”); Jay P. Greene (“Methodological Appendix”).

Publisher: EducationNext

Year: 2013

URL: http://educationnext.org/the-educational-value-of-field-trips/; http://educationnext.org/supplemental-study-long-term-benefits-of-field-trips-to-the-walton-arts-center/; http://educationnext.org/methodological-appendix-for-the-crystal-bridges-experimental-study/

Topics: field trips, museums, arts education, experimental designs, visual art

Methods: Randomized controlled trial. Researchers worked with Crystal Bridges to assign spots to matched pairs of applicant groups. Treatment group received a tour that semester and control group was deferred to the next semester. Surveys were administered to the treatment group – 489 teachers and 10,912 students – around 3 weeks after their tour. The surveys assessed “knowledge about art as well as measures of critical thinking, historical empathy, tolerance, and sustained interest in visiting art museums.” One of the survey items involved writing a response to a work of art unfamiliar to the students; 3811 of these essays were graded for critical thinking skills according to a methodology developed by researchers at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. 750 essays were coded twice with a high degree of inter-coder reliability. For the analysis, regression models controlled for gender, grade level, and matched pair group, while “standard validity tests confirmed that the survey items employed to generate the various scales used as outcomes measured the same underlying constructs.” A different version of the survey was administered to students in kindergarten through second grade.

What it says: Crystal Bridges is a new art museum in Arkansas that opened in 2011. As the only major art museum in the area, it offers nearby schools all-expenses paid tours for their students. These field trips were very popular on opening and the excess demand created an opportunity for a randomized study. The field trips involved an hourlong tour of the museum during which the students typically discussed five paintings, along with an additional hour or so of classroom instruction with the assistance of materials provided to the teachers. Students who participated in the field trips were able to recall factual details about the paintings at a fairly high rate, display improved critical thinking skills in evaluating a work of art they hadn’t yet seen, manifest increased “historical empathy” and tolerance for viewpoints different than their own, and report a higher interest in visiting museums in the future. All of these effects were stronger among students from high-poverty schools and especially pronounced (with effect sizes sometimes doubled or even tripled compared to the overall control group) among students from rural schools. In addition, the researchers set up a behavioral measure to test willingness to visit a museum by handing out vouchers for free admission to Crystal Bridges to the treatment and control groups; despite receiving 49% of the vouchers, 58% of the visits came from the treatment group – a particularly impressive result given that these students had just recently visited the museum and their appetite could have been satiated by the experience. It appears that to a large degree, the higher effect sizes seen among disadvantaged students can be explained by the fact that this was their first time visiting Crystal Bridges, as students in the treatment group who were new to the museum showed similarly impressive improvements. The K-2 students, who are also less likely to have visited a museum before, likewise exhibited especially strong gains. Notably, students from low-poverty schools and large towns appeared to benefit little or not at all from the exposure.

A second, supplemental study took advantage of a natural experiment in school zoning that resulted in some students making more field trips to performances at the Walton Arts Center than others. This study finds beneficial outcomes for students who took more field trips, including increased desire to attend cultural events or programs, increased desire to participate in choir or drama themselves, increased (self-reported) empathy, and increased (self-reported) tolerance. Notably, these effects are present even though the field trips took place over a period of years.

What I think about it: Overall, the main study exhibits an impressive degree of thoughtfulness in its design that allows for quite a bit of credence in its findings. The questions, about the educational value of one of the most common arts experiences that children have, are quite relevant to practice, and the findings regarding the value of field trips for first-time museum attendees are particularly provocative. For all of the study’s strengths, at many points the effects of attending Crystal Bridges specifically are conflated with the effects of visiting any museum or having any culturally enriching experience, and the authors could have done more to distinguish these by, for example, tracking what other cultural activities the students in the treatment and control groups had been or were being exposed to. (The supplemental study does address this in part by changing the focus to performing arts, but the design is not as tight in this case and the effects may well be attributable to the school environment in general rather than to the field trips specifically.)

In addition, I wonder to what degree some of the results observed are the effect of priming rather than the actual museum experience, particularly survey questions about things like freedom of expression in museums. It would have been interesting to divide the control group and have some students be told or reminded shortly before the survey that they are going to be visiting Crystal Bridges the following semester while other students are not given this stimulus. One important limitation to note is that the study measures only the short-term impacts of the field trips, and it’s unclear if the noted improvement in critical thinking skills would carry over to non-arts contexts. Again, the supplemental study addresses long-term impacts obliquely, but not directly.

What it all means: The Crystal Bridges experimental study strongly suggests that facilitated field trips have benefits to elementary school students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds and who have not had the opportunity to visit a museum before. The experience promotes prosocial attitudes and at least one means of skill-building in the form of visual attention to detail, though it is not clear if this carries over to other kinds of critical thinking tasks. While the effect sizes are fairly small on the whole, they appear to be real and are impressive considering the unsustained nature of the field trip experience. All in all, this is strong evidence of the importance and value of “common” opportunities to participate in the arts even beyond their role of sparking self-actualization through making or performing art.