Drawing and the Brain

Champions of Change: Impact of the Arts on Learning

The report of a federal research project involving 25,000 school students found a significant correlation between high levels of involvement in the arts and performance on nearly every measure of standardized testing. As this and other studies have found, engagement in the arts, especially visual arts such as drawing, develops skills in other areas as well:

• Art facilitates the development of spacial reasoning skills.
• Art develops fine motor skills, necessary prerequisites for writing.
• Art serves as a bridge between one’s mind and the real world.
• Art helps students visualize the images words represent as they learn to read.
• Art increases a child’s ability to create abstractions and mental process in the abstract.
• Art develops patience, sustained attention, and self-regulation (that is, control of impulsivity).
• Art cultivates one of the multiple intelligences identified by Harvard University’s Howard Gardner.
• Art develops the whole brain and the whole child.