In collaboration with the Mason Arts Research Center — supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Early Learning Coalition of Miami-Dade/Monroe, and the Children’s Trust— we collaborated with a team of academic researchers to conduct comprehensive longitudinal studies on arts education accessibility and student achievement throughout middle and high school.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era (2002-2015) left education stakeholders wondering how consequential accountability policies impacted visual and performing arts education across public schools in the United States. To better understand this, we examined changes in the landscape of visual and performing arts programs during the NCLB era, including classroom instructional time and staffing.

A partnership with a Southern California School District allowed us to design and implement a mixed-methods longitudinal research study to understand the academic achievement and motivational factors linked to adolescents’ engagement in the district’s sequentially designed dance programs, including the pre-professional SanArts Dance Conservatory.

This encyclopedia entry describes the origins of early artistic activity, followed by a summary of art, culture, and society. It then explains underlying processes of how art increases adaptive cognitive and socio-emotional development and briefly reviews each human developmental stage in relation to artistic engagement and outcomes.