iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

Structuring a school around the arts can help students excel academically and develop social and emotional skills.

Fifth-grade students who created some type of art—such as a drawing, writing a rap song, singing a science lesson, or choreographing a dance—that reflected specific classroom lessons, retained science-based knowledge longer than students who didn’t make art in the same class, according to a new study from Johns Hopkins University. These interdisciplinary findings support the benefits of broader arts integration into conventional classrooms.

As a specific example, the researchers found that students who memorized and sang a song with lyrics that held science-based lessons remembered the content much longer and with better detail than most classmates who tried to retain textbook content learned by rote without a song. This paper, “The Effects of Arts-Integrated Instruction on Memory for Science Content,” was recently published in Trends in Neuroscience and Education.