The Partnership for Arts Integration Research (PAIR) Project
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education engages students, inspires teachers, and demonstrates impact by weaving visual, digital, and performing arts into classrooms across Chicago.
The Partnership for Arts Integration Research (PAIR) project worked directly with six elementary schools, grouped into three pairs. Each pair of schools shared one set of two teaching artists, who partnered with 4th, 5th, and 6th grade classroom teachers to focus on integrating the arts into one major academic content area.
What did we learn?
Striking gains in student achievement and teacher growth through arts integration are the clear, independently analyzed outcomes of the PAIR project. Importantly, these results, culled from multiple and extensive real data sources, arrive at an actual demonstration of cause and effect.
Thanks to the PAIR research, we can state unequivocally that an arts integrated partnership approach had a definitive, positive impact on student performance and teacher growth.
For PAIR, innovative research strategies and tools gathered rich data and documentation from multiple sources. The depth of this approach provided researchers with a fuller picture as to what happened with student learning and teacher impact during the life of the project.
Further, by collating and cross-examining multiple data sources, PAIR researchers were able to make strong statements as to causality, something that often evades research in arts education and integration.
PAIR has provided researchers with the evidence to state causal links between the arts and teacher growth and student achievement.
Though this study is now a decade old, key aspects of the research was replicated in subsequent studies: IBTAP (2014) and PDP (2015).
https://capechicago.org/pair-partnership-for-arts-integration-research/
https://capechicago.org/pair-partnership-for-arts-integration-research/the-outcomes/