This Effective Practices Brief summarizes select research and focuses on two perspectives

on the arts in education: (1) the arts as a vehicle for differentiating instruction and offering multiple pathways to learning, and (2) the arts as a discipline within general education. This brief summarizes issues related to researching the arts as well as policy shifts mandating the arts in education. Overview The “No Child Left Behind ” Act (2002) federally mandated fi ne arts as a core academic subject. It requires that everything taught in our schools be built on evidence-based practices, and the arts are included under this umbrella. Researching the arts requires capturing both the implicit and explicit benefi ts of the arts across many disciplines and areas of assessment. Explicit learning, from the outside – in, is what we see, read, write and talk about, and is more easily assessed than implicit learning, from the inside-out, which begins as an internal process, experiential learning, trial and error, and life experience learning. The arts naturally lend themselves to inside-out qualitative, anecdotal re-search. However, important studies have been done which tie the arts to explicit qualitative and quantitative outcomes. These studies help link the vastness of the arts with more narrowly defi ned categories of academic success and test-based assessments. Keep in mind that quantitative evaluation measures do not isolate th