Moreover, beyond these cognitive aspects expected transfer effects also cover creativity outcomes, motivational benefits, or even improvements in socio-emotional skills ( Winner et al., 2013b Watson et al., 2019). These hypothesized transfer effects comprise cognitive side effects regarding general academic achievement and intelligence development ( Bastian et al., 2000) but also more specific abilities such as problem-solving, critical thinking, memory, or spatial and geometrical thinking ( Winner et al., 2013b). Rather, beyond these intrinsic values of art for art’s sake, engagement with the arts is also seen as a potential means to achieve broader positive “side effects” that are usually labeled as “ transfer effects” ( Knigge, 2013). Therefore, arts education in schools and museums or other institutions is not only expected to promote so-called “ primary effects” of arts education in terms of cultural participation or the development of receptive and productive competencies in various aesthetic and artistic forms of expression ( Keuchel, 2019). It has been hypothesized for decades that an active engagement with the arts in general and the visual arts in particular might yield a plethora of beneficial effects, within and even beyond the arts itself ( Baker, 2012 Catterall et al., 2012 Bowen et al., 2013 Winner et al., 2013b). Therefore, our study provides causal evidence that visual-arts programs situated in an art-museum context can advance socio-emotional skills, when designed properly.Ĭognitive and Socio-Emotional Transfer Effects of Visual-Arts Education In contrast, no significant effects on socio-emotional skills were found in the course focussing on art history. Results indicate that an instructional focus on drawing the facial expressions of emotions yields specific improvements in emotion recognition, whereas drawing persons in different social roles yields a higher level of self-complexity in the self-concept task. We used an animated morph task to measure emotion recognition performance and a self-concept task to measure the self-complexity of participants before and after all three courses. We expected positive socio-emotional transfer effects in the two “psychological” courses. The two other courses were designed in a way that the artistic engagement in portrait drawing was interwoven with practicing socio-emotional skills, namely empathy and emotion recognition in one course and understanding complex self-concept structures in the other. In the first and more “traditional” course portrait drawing was used to better understand how portraits looked like in former centuries. The courses mainly differed regarding their instructional focus, which was either on periods of art history, on the facial expression of emotions, or on the self-perception of a person in the context of different social roles. To conduct a randomized field trial, three strictly parallelized and standardized art courses were developed, all of which addressed the topic of portrait drawing. The program was delivered in a museum context in three sessions and was expected to yield specific and objectively measurable transfer effects. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to design and experimentally investigate a theory-based visual-arts education program for adolescents aged between 12 and 19 years ( M age = 15.02, SD age = 1.75). This is partly due to a lack of experimental comparisons, theory-based designs, and objective measurements in the literature on transfer effects of arts education. However, the empirical basis of these hopes is limited. So-called cognitive and socio-emotional “transfer” effects into other domains have been claimed. An active engagement with arts in general and visual arts in particular has been hypothesized to yield beneficial effects beyond arts itself.
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