Arts Integration and Student Engagement

One of the most crucial parts of education is making sure your students are engaged. Student engagement is characterized as having three facets: behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement. Additionally, student engagement is often linked with academic achievement; i.e. higher engagement often leads to higher academic achievement (Kearsley & Schneiderman, 1998). The purpose of this study was to investigate how cross-curricular arts integration impacted student engagement. Arts-integration is the practice of using art forms to teach concepts unrelated to the arts. This study took place in a classroom with 34 students, all in 4th grade. I taught a series of lessons in different content areas that all included arts-integration. After each lesson, I collected student feedback on how they enjoyed the lesson and kept a running record of my own observations of students and their engagement during the various forms of arts integration. I found that integrating the arts into the curriculum led to positive trends in student’s engagement. These findings are consistent with other studies that have been conducted on similar topics.