Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

As federal and state high-stakes accountability has increased, focus on students’ math and reading test scores has intensified. Schools have shifted time and other resources towards math and reading preparation. This could come at the detriment of other important student skills and knowledge. Traditionally, schools have been expected to teach more than just math and reading. They have been expected to teach civic values as well as a variety of socioemotional skills. It is also plausible that activities such as school field trips could positively affect student academic achievement by either a transfer of knowledge between subjects or by increasing student engagement in school. Despite the traditional priority schools gave to going on field trips to culturally enriching institutions, these field trips are clearly on the decline. Even when schools still go on field trips, they are likely to take “reward” field trips, such as attending an amusement park, rather than attending culturally enriching community institutions, such as art museums, theaters, and zoos. Previous research has shown correlations between culturally enriching activities on student academic and socioemotional outcomes. However, there is an emerging small body of literature that uses rigorous causal methods to estimate the effects of these activities on student outcomes. This literature on single field trip interventions has shown benefits for children’s social understanding and critical thinking, but it is unclear whether these benefits endure over time or could be increased by providing students with multiple field trips.

We expand the current literature by using experimental methods as well as evaluating the effects of multiple art-focused field trips for student outcomes. In partnership with the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia and select Georgia public schools, we conducted a multi-year randomized experiment on the effects of multiple arts-focused field trips. From our knowledge, we are the first to conduct a multi-year, multiple field trip experiment. Over two years, we randomly assigned 4th and 5th grade classes within ten different elementary schools to receive three experiences or to serve as the control. The three experiences consisted of visiting an art museum, hearing a symphony, and seeing a play. A subset of our sample, received six field trips over the course of two years.

We estimated the causal impacts of the field trips on a variety of student social/emotional outcomes, including social perspective taking, school engagement, and interest in arts activities, in addition to impacts on student test scores in math and English Language Arts. In year one, we found a positive and statistically significant increase in students desires to consume arts. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found a statistically significant increase, up to 12% of a standard deviation, in student’s standardized test scores in math and reading. In our presentation, we will offer some potential explanations for this finding. We will also discuss longitudinal findings across year two, where we examined if these patterns persist for students who participated in field trips during the first year and if those who received six field trips experienced larger effects.