Relationship Between Visual Arts Learning and Understanding Geometry

Does experience in the visual arts build spatial reasoning skills that could be useful in STEM fields such as mathematics? We conducted a quasi-experimental study to find out. Three cohorts of students entering 9^th grade and majoring either in visual arts (test group) or theater (control group) in a public urban high school for the arts were followed for two years. An additional control group of students in an afterschool squash program was also included. All students were from the Boston Public School system. A test of “artistic envisioning” and a test of geometric reasoning were administered at the beginning of 9^th grade (pretest), at the end of 9^th grade (posttest 1) and at the end of 10^thgrade (posttest 2). The geometry test consisted primarily of release items from national and international tests that did not require knowledge of formulae. The art envisioning test, developed in collaboration with artists, consisted of tasks requiring translating 3-D information into convincing 2-D form, drawing a mentally rotated image, drawing the negative space in a display, abstraction (reducing organic forms to simpler underlying forms), and projection (drawing the direction, shape and size of shadows from a given light source).

Preliminary findings based on 108 Cohort 1 and Cohort 2 students revealed that the visual arts group had a higher mean score on both the geometry pretest and first posttest than did the control groups. The visual arts group showed greater gains in geometry from pretest to posttest1 than did controls.  When controlling for pre-test differences, including pre-test geometry scores and change scores on the art measure, membership in the visual arts group remained a significant predictor of post-test1 geometry scores. When controlling for pretest geometry scores, scores on the art pretest were a significant predictor of posttest1 geometry scores.

These findings are consistent with a prior correlational study in our lab showing that art majors in college outperform psychology majors on a measure of geometric reasoning.  We argue that the kind of envisioning used in the visual arts overlaps with that used in geometry, and our findings suggest that visual arts education could be a “way in” to STEM fields for students who think they cannot succeed in math.