Besides music, what possible benefits do other art forms have on young minds? Dana Consortium researchers Scott Grafton and Emily Cross at the University of California in Santa Barbara found that students who merely observed dancing learned movement skills almost as much as actual practice. In addition to teaching movement, dance may well spill over into other skill areas such as reasoning function. In fact, the arts in general may offer a cognitive boost — as humanities mavens have been telling us all along. One of the most exciting and useful Dana Consortium findings tracked persistence and motivation. Michael Posner at the University of Oregon discovered that attention training in children, keeping them focused on one set of tasks, also developed their general ability to focus, which carries over to other areas in their lives. Thus, any arts medium that can capture a child’s interest can in turn motivate them to focus, Posner said in the Dana report. “If the child is interested in a particular art form, their attention can be trained by that art form,” he said. “We concluded that if we tailored the arts education to the individual interest of the child, we could produce a highly motivated child who would sustain attention over long periods of time.” Meanwhile, at the National Gallery of Art, Patterson has conducted her own study looking at the practical effects of their teen arts program. “We found it positively affected their artistic and social development,” she said of surveying students in past high school seminars. Specifically, Patterson said the arts development training gave teens confidence in public speaking and enabled them to be more open-minded about other views. The program also influenced the parents, she added, with some relieved to realize that there are many career options in which a creative person can make a living and that they weren’t necessarily raising a future “starving artist.” A Neuroscientist’s Perspective What Patterson and her colleagues are doing at the National Gallery is “wonderful,” said Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a Harvard-trained cognitive neuroscientist, educational psychologist and professor at the University of Southern California. Immordino-Yang is also a former middle school teacher and parent who gives workshops to educators on brain science. Her own research looks at the intertwining of emotion and learning, an interlock she believes is an ancient mechanism for human survival. Hearing a description of the National Gallery of Art’s high school seminars, she praised the program’s learning strategies for creating a “scaffolding of the student’s own values and emotions, helping kids make meaning out of what they see, both cognitive meaning and emotional meaning.” Bringing the two together motivates further learning, as does a positive social environment, she noted. Immordino-Yang told The Washington Diplomat that the notion of emotions getting in the way of clear thinking is a myth. She cited studies showing that brain-damaged or psychopathic people who lack emotion have poor decision-making and analytic skills as a result. Good thinking, responsible decision-making and classroom learning have a “necessary emotional component,” she argues. As an example, Immordino-Yang recalled an Ohio teacher who had given up on her middle school violin class of bored and un-cooperative students. Nothing seemed to work until Immordino-Yang and the teacher developed a new approach whereby each student would pantomime a situation from his or her life, without any words, while a friend in the class would translate that ex-perience by playing violin music. “It’s working,” Immordino-Yang said. “They’re using the violins in a way that has emotional meaning to them and they’re learning from other students.” As another example, Immordino-Yang explained how her 6-year-old daughter wanted to learn a piano piece for her grandparents’ upcoming visit, “but it was too hard for her and she was frustrated. Suddenly she said, ‘Why don’t I make flashcards to learn the notes?’ — something I never would have suggested. She designed the cards, we made them together, and she drilled herself on the notes. My role as parent was to be enthusiastic and help her reach her goal.” Immordino-Yang advises that all parents help their children actively engage with the world around them and discover things on their own, following their interests instead of your own. Also, parents should model behaviors for children, including enthusiasm for learning, and help them reflect on their experience by simply asking them about it. So what about the Mozart effect, which wasn’t necessarily shown to be all that effective? “The original research itself was fine, but it was limited and done with college students. It showed that exposure to certain Mozart pieces heightened specific cognitive skills for 20 minutes,” Immordino-Yang said. “It’s a fallacy to expand beyond that. It had nothing to do with infants.” The most unfortunate Mozart effect, according to Immordino-Yang, is that it encouraged parents to buy toys that promoted pas-sivity over play. “Children need to actively engage with the world to learn. Playing with sticks in the dirt is better than watching a CD or listening to a toy that talks. The more a toy does for a child, the less helpful it is for that child’s development.” Carolyn Cosmos is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat. Resources National Gallery of Art – In addition to high school seminars, the National Gallery of Art offers one-time workshops for groups of middle and high school students in which they can explore a single topic, with this year’s topic focusing on the exhibition “Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples.” There are also separate “teen studios” — free five-hour Saturday workshops with different themes — for students in grades 9 through 12, which includes a gallery visit, art instruction and studio time. Other education offerings include teacher workshops and school tours, including customized tours that the gallery will design with advance notice. For more information, visit www.nga.gov/education/. Lawrence Academy – More information about Mary Helen Immordino-Yang’s summer workshops for teachers and adminis-trators, held in Massachusetts, can be found at the Lawrence Academy’s Web site: www.lacademy.edu. Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition – The complete Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition can be found at www.dana.org.

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