In the third year results at kindergarten we see gains in the treatment group that can be described as more than modest, with kindergarteners gaining four to five months’ additional developmental growth, particularly in the Mathematics and Science domain, where we see at least five months’ additional developmental growth. These third year results at kindergarten closely mirror the third year results in the first Arts Impact project (that third year was 2008-09), where we also saw fairly significant gains in treatment students. While therefore this cannot yet be termed trend data, we now have two comparable data points with similar results.
We witnessed in 2012-13 the treatment kindergarten pupils arriving as low as five months developmentally behind the control kindergarteners. For five year-olds this is a non-trivial gap. By the end of the school year the treatment pupils caught up and even in some instances slightly surpassed the control kindergarteners. This was true to varying degrees in all four sub-scales of the Child Observation Record (COR; a detailed description is below): Math and Science, the greatest gains, followed by Initiative and Social Relations; to a lesser extent Music and Movement and Language and Literacy.
Overall results on the new Common Core-aligned New York State Tests: