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 fine 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 benefits 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 defined categories of academic success and test-based assessments. Keep in mind that quantitative evaluation measures do not isolate the value of implicit learning in units. Yet the arts teach qualitative values to students, such as compassion, social and emotional fluency, joy, and creativity, which contribute to a rich and successful life. Therefore, both quan-titative and qualitative research will give us the fullest picture of the contribution the arts make. Studies of explicit learning outcomes reported in the Arts Education Partnership publication Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development (2002) describe: • Visual arts/drawing: Linking directly to the development of writing ability in terms of content and organi-zation, sophisticated reading skills, and reasoning about scientific images; • Music/early childhood music training: Linking to cognitive development; • Music/listening: Linking to spatial reasoning, spatial temporal reasoning, quality of writing, and prolixity of writing