What Should Children Learn on a Field Trip to an Art Muesum

Crystal Bridges; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Schoolhouse Tour © 2013 Stephen Ironside/Ironside Photography
Bo Bartlett – "The Box" –  2002 • Oil on Linen • 82 10 100 – Lensman is Karen Mauch

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The school field trip has a long history in American public education. For decades, students have piled into yellow buses to visit a diverseness of cultural institutions, including art, natural history, and science museums, as well as theaters, zoos, and historical sites. Schools gladly endured the expense and disruption of providing field trips because they saw these experiences as primal to their educational mission: schools be not only to provide economically useful skills in numeracy and literacy, but also to produce civilized young men and women who would appreciate the arts and civilization. More-advantaged families may have their children to these cultural institutions exterior of school hours, but less-advantaged students are less likely to have these experiences if schools do non provide them. With field trips, public schools viewed themselves as the great blaster in terms of access to our cultural heritage.

Today, culturally enriching field trips are in reject. Museums across the country report a steep driblet in schoolhouse tours. For example, the Field Museum in Chicago at ane fourth dimension welcomed more than 300,000 students every year. Recently the number is below 200,000. Between 2002 and 2007, Cincinnati arts organizations saw a thirty percent decrease in educatee attendance. A survey past the American Clan of School Administrators found that more than than half of schools eliminated planned field trips in 2010–11.

The decision to reduce culturally enriching field trips reflects a variety of factors. Financial pressures force schools to make hard decisions near how to allocate scarce resource, and field trips are increasingly seen every bit an unnecessary frill. Greater focus on raising student operation on math and reading standardized tests may also lead schools to cut field trips. Some schools believe that pupil fourth dimension would be ameliorate spent in the classroom preparing for the exams. When schools do organize field trips, they are increasingly choosing to have students on trips to reward them for working hard to meliorate their test scores rather than to provide cultural enrichment. Schools take students to amusement parks, sporting events, and movie theaters instead of to museums and historical sites. This shift from "enrichment" to "reward" field trips is reflected in a generational change among teachers about the purposes of these outings. In a 2012‒13 survey we conducted of nearly 500 Arkansas teachers, those who had been pedagogy for at least 15 years were significantly more than probable to believe that the chief purpose of a field trip is to provide a learning opportunity, while more than inferior teachers were more likely to see the primary purpose equally "enjoyment."

If schools are de-emphasizing culturally enriching field trips, has annihilation been lost as a result? Surprisingly, we accept relatively trivial rigorous evidence virtually how field trips affect students. The research presented here is the first large-calibration randomized-control trial designed to measure what students acquire from school tours of an fine art museum.

We find that students learn quite a lot. In particular, enriching field trips contribute to the development of students into civilized young men and women who possess more knowledge about fine art, accept stronger critical-thinking skills, exhibit increased historical empathy, brandish college levels of tolerance, and accept a greater taste for consuming fine art and culture.

Blueprint of the Study and School Tours

The 2011 opening of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Fine art in Northwest Arkansas created the opportunity for this study. Crystal Bridges is the first major art museum to exist built in the United States in the concluding 4 decades, with more 50,000 square feet of gallery space and an endowment in excess of $800 million. Portions of the museum'south endowment are devoted to covering all of the expenses associated with schoolhouse tours. Crystal Bridges reimburses schools for the cost of buses, provides free admission and luncheon, and even pays for the cost of substitute teachers to encompass for teachers who accompany students on the bout.

Because the tour is completely complimentary to schools, and because Crystal Bridges was congenital in an area that never previously had an art museum, at that place was high demand for school tours. Non all school groups could be accommodated correct away. And so our research team worked with the staff at Crystal Bridges to assign spots for school tours by lottery. During the beginning ii semesters of the school tour program, the museum received 525 applications from school groups representing 38,347 students in kindergarten through grade 12. We created matched pairs among the applicant groups based on similarity in grade level and other demographic factors. An ideal and common matched pair would be adjacent grades in the same school. We then randomly ordered the matched pairs to decide scheduling prioritization. Within each pair, nosotros randomly assigned which applicant would exist in the treatment grouping and receive a tour that semester and which would be in the control group and have its tour deferred.

Nosotros administered surveys to 10,912 students and 489 teachers at 123 different schools three weeks, on boilerplate, later the treatment group received its tour. The student surveys included multiple items assessing cognition nearly art too every bit measures of critical thinking, historical empathy, tolerance, and sustained interest in visiting art museums. Some groups were surveyed as late every bit eight weeks after the tour, but information technology was non possible to collect information later on longer periods because each control group was guaranteed a tour during the post-obit semester equally a reward for its cooperation. There is no indication that the results reported below faded for groups surveyed subsequently longer periods.

Nosotros also assessed students' critical-thinking skills by asking them to write a short essay in response to a painting that they had not previously seen. Finally, we collected a behavioral measure out of interest in art consumption by providing all students with a coded coupon proficient for gratis family admission to a special showroom at the museum to see whether the field trip increased the likelihood of students making futurity visits.

All results reported below are derived from regression models that control for educatee grade level and gender and make comparisons within each matched pair, while taking into account the fact that students in the matched pair of bidder groups are likely to be like in means that we are unable to discover. Standard validity tests confirmed that the survey items employed to generate the diverse scales used as outcomes measured the same underlying constructs.

The intervention we studied is a pocket-sized 1. Students received a one-hour tour of the museum in which they typically viewed and discussed 5 paintings. Some students were costless to roam the museum following their formal tour, but the entire experience ordinarily involved less than one-half a day. Instructional materials were sent to teachers who went on a tour, simply our survey of teachers suggests that these materials received relatively niggling attending, on average no more than an hour of total class time. The discussion of each painting during the tour was largely pupil-directed, with the museum educators facilitating the discourse and providing commentary beyond the names of the work and the artist and a brief description only when students requested it. This format is now the norm in school tours of fine art museums. The aversion to having museum educators provide information about works of fine art is motivated in part by progressive didactics theories and by a conviction among many in museum education that students retain very little factual information from their tours.

Results

Recalling Tour Details. Our research suggests that students actually retain a bang-up deal of factual information from their tours. Students who received a tour of the museum were able to recall details about the paintings they had seen at very high rates. For instance, 88 percent of the students who saw the Eastman Johnson painting At the Camp—Spinning Yarns and Whittling knew when surveyed weeks later that the painting depicts abolitionists making maple syrup to undermine the sugar industry, which relied on slave labor. Similarly, 82 percent of those who saw Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter could call back that the painting emphasizes the importance of women entering the workforce during World State of war II. Among students who saw Thomas Hart Benton'southward Ploughing It Under, 79 percent recollected that it is a depiction of a farmer destroying his crops as part of a Depression-era price support program. And seventy percentage of the students who saw Romare Bearden'southward Sacrifice could remember that it is part of the Harlem Renaissance art movement. Since there was no guarantee that these facts would be raised in student-directed discussions, and considering students had no particular reason for remembering these details (at that place was no examination or grade associated with the tours), it is impressive that they could recall historical and sociological information at such high rates.

These results suggest that art could be an important tool for effectively conveying traditional bookish content, but this analysis cannot bear witness it. The control-group operation was hardly better than take chances in identifying factual information about these paintings, just they never had the opportunity to acquire the material. The high charge per unit of recall of factual information by students who toured the museum demonstrates that the tours fabricated an impression. The students could think important details nigh what they saw and discussed.

Critical Thinking. Beyond recalling the details of their tour, did a visit to an art museum have a significant effect on students? Our study demonstrates that it did. For case, students randomly assigned to receive a school tour of Crystal Bridges later displayed demonstrably stronger ability to think critically virtually art than the command group.

During the first semester of the study, nosotros showed all 3rd- through 12th-grade students a painting they had not previously seen, Bo Bartlett's The Box. We then asked students to write curt essays in response to two questions: What exercise you think is going on in this painting? And, what practice you see that makes you call up that? These are standard prompts used by museum educators to spark discussion during school tours.

We stripped the essays of all identifying data and had two coders rate the compositions using a seven-particular rubric for measuring critical thinking that was adult by researchers at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The mensurate is based on the number of instances that students engaged in the post-obit in their essays: observing, interpreting, evaluating, associating, problem finding, comparing, and flexible thinking. Our measure of disquisitional thinking is the sum of the counts of these seven items. In total, our enquiry squad blindly scored 3,811 essays. For 750 of those essays, 2 researchers scored them independently. The scores they assigned to the same essay were very similar, demonstrating that we were able to measure critical thinking about art with a high degree of inter-coder reliability.

We express the impact of a school tour of Crystal Bridges on critical-thinking skills in terms of standard-departure issue sizes. Overall, nosotros find that students assigned by lottery to a tour of the museum better their power to think critically nearly art by nine percent of a standard deviation relative to the control group. The benefit for disadvantaged groups is considerably larger (see Figure i). Rural students, who live in towns with fewer than 10,000 people, experience an increment in critical-thinking skills of nearly one-tertiary of a standard deviation. Students from high-poverty schools (those where more than 50 per centum of students receive free or reduced-price lunches) experience an 18 percent result-size comeback in critical thinking about art, as practice minority students.

A large amount of the gain in critical-thinking skills stems from an increment in the number of observations that students made in their essays. Students who went on a tour became more observant, noticing and describing more than details in an image. Existence observant and paying attention to detail is an important and highly useful skill that students learn when they study and discuss works of fine art. Boosted research is required to determine if the gains in critical thinking when analyzing a work of art would transfer into improved critical thinking almost other, not-fine art-related subjects.

Historical Empathy. Tours of art museums besides affect students' values. Visiting an art museum exposes students to a diversity of ideas, peoples, places, and time periods. That broadening experience imparts greater appreciation and understanding. We see the effects in significantly higher historical empathy and tolerance measures amongst students randomly assigned to a schoolhouse tour of Crystal Bridges.

Historical empathy is the ability to understand and appreciate what life was like for people who lived in a different time and place. This is a central purpose of education history, equally it provides students with a clearer perspective about their own fourth dimension and place. To measure historical empathy, we included iii statements on the survey with which students could limited their level of understanding or disagreement: 1) I take a good understanding of how early Americans thought and felt; ii) I tin imagine what life was similar for people 100 years agone; and 3) When looking at a painting that shows people, I try to imagine what those people are thinking. Nosotros combined these items into a scale measuring historical empathy.

Students who went on a bout of Crystal Bridges experience a 6 percentage of a standard deviation increase in historical empathy. Amid rural students, the benefit is much larger, a fifteen percentage of a standard deviation gain. We can illustrate this do good past focusing on ane of the items in the historical empathy scale. When asked to agree or disagree with the argument, "I have a good understanding of how early Americans thought and felt," 70 percent of the handling-group students express agreement compared to 66 per centum of the command group. Among rural participants, 69 percent of the treatment-group students agree with this argument compared to 62 percent of the control grouping. The fact that Crystal Bridges features art from different periods in American history may accept helped produce these gains in historical empathy.

Tolerance. To mensurate tolerance we included iv statements on the survey to which students could limited their level of agreement or disagreement: ane) People who disagree with my point of view bother me; 2) Artists whose work is disquisitional of America should not be allowed to have their work shown in fine art museums; three) I capeesh hearing views unlike from my ain; and 4) I recollect people tin can have dissimilar opinions about the same affair. We combined these items into a scale measuring the general effect of the bout on tolerance.

Overall, receiving a school tour of an fine art museum increases student tolerance by vii pct of a standard deviation. Every bit with critical thinking, the benefits are much larger for students in disadvantaged groups. Rural students who visited Crystal Bridges feel a 13 percentage of a standard deviation improvement in tolerance. For students at loftier-poverty schools, the benefit is 9 percent of a standard difference.

The improvement in tolerance for students who went on a bout of Crystal Bridges can be illustrated by the responses to one of the items within the tolerance scale. When asked about the statement, "Artists whose piece of work is critical of America should non be immune to have their work shown in fine art museums," 35 pct of the control-group students limited agreement. But for students randomly assigned to receive a school bout of the art museum, simply 32 per centum agree with censoring art critical of America. Among rural students, 34 percent of the control group would censor art compared to xxx percent for the treatment group. In loftier-poverty schools, 37 per centum of the control-group students would censor compared to 32 percent of the treatment-group students. These differences are non huge, but neither is the intervention. These changes represent the realistic comeback in tolerance that results from a half-day experience at an art museum.

Interest in Art Museums. Perhaps the near important outcome of a school tour is whether it cultivates an interest among students in returning to cultural institutions in the future. If visiting a museum helps ameliorate critical thinking, historical empathy, tolerance, and other outcomes non measured in this study, then those benefits would chemical compound for students if they were more than probable to frequent similar cultural institutions throughout their life. The direct furnishings of a single visit are necessarily modest and may non persist, but if school tours help students become regular museum visitors, they may enjoy a lifetime of enhanced critical thinking, tolerance, and historical empathy.

We measured how schoolhouse tours of Crystal Bridges develop in students an interest in visiting fine art museums in two ways: with survey items and a behavioral measure. We included a series of items in the survey designed to gauge student involvement:

• I plan to visit art museums when I am an adult.

• I would tell my friends they should visit an art museum.

• Trips to art museums are interesting.

• Trips to art museums are fun.

• Would your friend like to go to an art museum on a field trip?

• Would yous like more museums in your community?

• How interested are yous in visiting art museums?

• If your friends or family wanted to go to an art museum, how interested would yous be in going?

Involvement in visiting art museums among students who toured the museum is viii percent of a standard difference college than that in the randomized control group. Among rural students, the increase is much larger: 22 per centum of a standard deviation. Students at high-poverty schools score xi pct of a standard divergence college on the cultural consumer scale if they were randomly assigned to tour the museum. And minority students gain 10 per centum of a standard departure in their want to be fine art consumers.

Ane of the 8 items in the fine art consumer scale asked students to express the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with the statement, "I would tell my friends they should visit an art museum." For all students who received a tour, lxx percentage agree with this statement, compared to 66 percent in the control group. Amongst rural participants, 73 pct of the handling-group students agree versus 63 percentage of the control group. In loftier-poverty schools, 74 percent would recommend art museums to their friends compared to 68 percent of the control group. And amongst minority students, 72 percent of those who received a tour would tell their friends to visit an art museum, relative to 67 percentage of the control grouping. Students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, are more likely to take positive feelings nigh visiting museums if they receive a schoolhouse tour.

We also measured whether students are more likely to visit Crystal Bridges in the time to come if they received a school tour. All students who participated in the written report during the first semester, including those who did non receive a tour, were provided with a coupon that gave them and their families costless entry to a special showroom at Crystal Bridges. The coupons were coded so that we could determine the bidder group to which students belonged. Students had every bit long every bit vi months later on receipt of the coupon to use information technology.

We nerveless all redeemed coupons and were able to calculate how many adults and youths were admitted. Though students in the treatment group received 49 per centum of all coupons that were distributed, 58 percent of the people admitted to the special showroom with those coupons came from the treatment group. In other words, the families of students who received a bout were 18 percent more likely to return to the museum than we would await if their rate of coupon use was the same as their share of distributed coupons.

This is particularly impressive given that the treatment-group students had recently visited the museum. Their desire to visit a museum might accept been satiated, while the control group might have been curious to visit Crystal Bridges for the first fourth dimension. Despite having recently been to the museum, students who received a schoolhouse tour came back at college rates. Receiving a school bout cultivates a taste for visiting art museums, and perhaps for sharing the feel with others.

Disadvantaged Students

One consequent design in our results is that the benefits of a school tour are generally much larger for students from less-advantaged backgrounds. Students from rural areas and high-poverty schools, as well as minority students, typically show gains that are two to three times larger than those of the total sample. Disadvantaged students assigned by lottery to receive a school bout of an fine art museum brand exceptionally large gains in disquisitional thinking, historical empathy, tolerance, and becoming art consumers.

It appears that the less prior exposure to culturally enriching experiences students have, the larger the benefit of receiving a school tour of a museum. Nosotros take some direct measures to support this explanation. To isolate the effect of the first fourth dimension visiting the museum, we truncated our sample to include merely command-grouping students who had never visited Crystal Bridges and handling-grouping students who had visited for the beginning time during their tour. The issue for this first visit is roughly twice as large as that for the overall sample, just as information technology is for disadvantaged students.

In addition, we administered a different version of our survey to students in kindergarten through 2nd grade. Very immature students are less likely to have had previous exposure to culturally enriching experiences. Very immature students make exceptionally large improvements in the observed outcomes, just similar disadvantaged students and offset-time visitors.

When nosotros examine effects for subgroups of advantaged students, we typically discover much smaller or cipher effects. Students from large towns and low-poverty schools experience few significant gains from their schoolhouse tour of an art museum. If schools exercise non provide culturally enriching experiences for these students, their families are probable to take the inclination and power to provide those experiences on their own. Only the families of disadvantaged students are less likely to substitute their own efforts when schools do not offering culturally enriching experiences. Disadvantaged students need their schools to take them on enriching field trips if they are likely to take these experiences at all.

Policy Implications

School field trips to cultural institutions have notable benefits. Students randomly assigned to receive a school bout of an art museum feel improvements in their noesis of and ability to call back critically about art, display stronger historical empathy, develop higher tolerance, and are more probable to visit such cultural institutions as art museums in the future. If schools cut field trips or switch to "reward" trips that visit less-enriching destinations, then these important educational opportunities are lost. It is particularly important that schools serving disadvantaged students provide culturally enriching field trip experiences.

This first-e'er, large-calibration, random-assignment experiment of the effects of school tours of an fine art museum should help inform the thinking of school administrators, educators, policymakers, and philanthropists. Policymakers should consider these results when deciding whether schools have sufficient resources and appropriate policy guidance to take their students on tours of cultural institutions. School administrators should give thought to these results when deciding whether to use their resource and time for these tours. And philanthropists should weigh these results when deciding whether to build and maintain these cultural institutions with quality educational programs. We don't just want our children to acquire work skills from their educational activity; we also want them to develop into civilized people who appreciate the breadth of human accomplishments. The school field trip is an important tool for meeting this goal.

Jay P. Greene is professor of teaching reform at the University of Arkansas, where Brian Kisida is a senior research acquaintance and Daniel H. Bowen is a doctoral student.

Additional materials, including a supplemental study and a methodological appendix, are bachelor.

Final updated September 16, 2013

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Source: https://www.educationnext.org/the-educational-value-of-field-trips/

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