Research & Evaluation

Quality Teaching in the Arts (QTA)  |  Support  |  Articles

The Perpich Center’s Research and Evaluation program works to build understanding and create tools to improve student achievement in and through the arts. Developed in response to increasing emphasis on research-based decision-making, our mission is to provide leadership for teaching and learning in the arts. Our efforts focus on development of policies and best practices that promote teacher and artist professional growth and school effectiveness. Increased accountability for student learning is inspiring new approaches to teaching and assessing student understanding.

Quality Teaching in the ARts (QTA)

Raising Achievement in and through the Arts
With significant focus on professional development for teachers from high poverty schools, Quality Teaching in the Arts (QTA) activities seek to raise student achievement in and through the arts.

A grant from the US Department of Education provides 80% of the funding for this ambitious $1.2 Million, 4-year professional development initiative. Since 2005, QTA has provided professional development for over 700 Minnesota arts educators. The majority of them (60%) work in high poverty schools with hundreds of students. As a result, the program impacts an estimated 232,830 Minnesota students.

A strategic approach to improving performance
Working with teachers in and through dance, literary art, media art, music, theater and visual art, QTA applies strategies based on research about high-performing, high poverty schools.

According to the majority of QTA teachers, students are learning more, in part because have a better understanding of teacher expectations, the criteria for good work, and learning goals.

Using standards to promote achievement
70% of teachers say they are more confident in their use of standards to improve student achievement.

Teachers report significant improvement with all three QTA program goals:

1. Teachers understand the Minnesota Academic Standards in the Arts and how to align them with classroom curriculum

2. Teachers know how to productively develop standards aligned assessment activities and collect assessments (particular evidence) of student learning in and through the arts

3. Teachers understand how to describe levels of quality in student learning

Curriculum and Assessment Mapping Projects improve and measure the quality of instruction in K-12 classrooms.

• District-centered fine arts teaching cohorts work collaboratively to agree on major features of curriculum and shared assessments, often working across the kindergarten through twelfth grade range within each arts discipline.

• Teacher teams select examples of student work to collect and examine collaboratively to moderate teacher judgments about the quality of learning, and to improve curriculum and instruction.

• During the 2008-2009 school year, Assessment Mapping projects impacted

• All K-12 students in the following districts:  Bemidji, Worthington, Columbia Heights, and Willmar;

• All K-5 Duluth music students;

• All K-12 Rochester visual arts students

Quality Teaching Networks help teachers bring out the best in one another.

• Regional work groups composed of teachers in arts disciplines, and generalist teachers with a strong interest in one or more arts areas.

• As many as five networks open to individual teachers who meet six days each year to work on significant problems of standards-based, student-centered arts education (currently inactive).

Anchoring Curriculum Summer Seminars provide intensive training for educators in interdisciplinary teaching and learning.

• Teachers from across Minnesota convene for an intensive week of adult art making. Individuals and groups create a significant work or performance.

• Built on the Anchor Work Process, activities offer teachers multiple, and often interdisciplinary, approaches to standards-based, student-centered, arts teaching and learning.

In-School Laboratories stimulate innovation and teamwork

• Teacher teams collaboratively plan interdisciplinary units and build their capacity to align standard benchmarks with curriculum, assessments and evaluation in support of student learning

• Often centering on the arts, teams also include colleagues from other subject areas

Arts Education Research Assistance/Support

Arts Education Research Guidance is available to educators and artists who have an interest in researching arts education. With the implementation of Graduation Standards in the Arts, and with increasing emphasis on assessment of student learning and achievement in the arts, the territory for research in arts education is expanding. Guidance and consultation in research methodology and data collection is available in courses/workshops.

Publications and Articles

21st Century Learning and Minnesota School District Accountability Systems
The newly revised Minnesota Academic Standards in the Arts offer school districts focused and sequential learning targets that lead to high levels of cognitive activity. How will we work to realize the promise of incremental, spiraling curriculum to support the highest level of student learning for the 21st Century? Full text.

For more information call or email: Byron Richard, Education Research Coordinator, (763) 591-4721, 800-657-3518.