Freedom Area High School’s art teacher, Mrs. Kaylee Haggerty, has been researching on how student’s grades can reflect if they take an art class or not. In order to find her answer, she’ll be taking senior art students and non-art students and surveying them online in late February.

She’ll ask, “is there anything about the arts that has helped them?” For example, if they reached an issue with something, would they persevere and stay with it because of the arts? With the acquired information, she’s going to compare the data of seniors who have taken an art class and those who haven’t. The GPAs of the students will also be taken into account to see how it’s affected as well.

“I have decided to do seniors because they have had more opportunities to take art class. So, I can look and see if it affected them,” Haggerty said. This is helpful because not only has she known these seniors for years, but she has built up relationships with them. Also, before the survey, she’ll be sending out permission slips to make sure the students and their parents are OK that she looks at their information, even though everything will be anonymous.

What is the effect of enrollment in a visual arts class on 12 grade achievement as measured by GPA and student perception? This research question will be answered by the questions asked in Haggerty’s survey. Do you believe your experience in art class has helped you in your other classes in any way, and how have the arts aided you in your other courses? Why have you opted out of taking art, and do you plan on taking art in the future? These questions are to be answered by non-art-taking and art-taking senior students to show the difference or similarity as well as the diversity in the answers given.

Haggerty is doing this research project for her master’s degree. It’ll be published into the National Art EducationAssociation Journal. However, her project won’t officially be finished until the end of the semester. Getting the information, writing her hypothesis and coming to a conclusion takes a large amount of time. So, by the end of May, she’ll finally submit her project to the Journal.

What Haggerty is hoping to achieve is to learn more about what helps students with their overall academic success.

Also, she wants to learn more about Freedom students and what makes them better learners. The goal is to learn more about the students, to get this published in “Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education” and to complete her master’s program with this research.