| Mark Beasley
St. John's University
Relationship between school readiness and participation in arts related activities among high risk preschoolers
FINAL REPORT:
The focus of this investigation is determining correlates and consequences of young children's participation in arts and other culturally related activities which may help establish preliminary guidelines for federal arts policy. The results of preliminary exploratory analyses using School Readiness 1993 data from the NHES implied that low income families have limited access to America's "cultural capital" and that arts participation ameliorated the developmental difficulties of low-income children in the absence of participation in center-based program. Given that children from disadvantaged households are less likely to attend some form of preschool or participate in arts related activities, this also led to speculation about what an arts component could add to a preschool program. Thus a more systematic data analysis for a subsample of 4-year-old preschoolers is proposed. The policy issue of primary focus will employ variables associated with participation in arts activities and cultural events as measures for the potential benefits of arts education and cultural capital. Ethnicity will be included as a control variable because it beyond the scope of public policy. Factors such as parental education level, parental involvement, income level, and program participation, which are potentially actionable through public policy, will be statistically controlled to examine the effects of involvement in arts related activities on child development over and above these context variables. These results will assess the comparative effectiveness of center-based programs as they relate to the cultural capital issue providing information for policy-based preschool initiatives in arts education which may provide a potential outlet for serving the needs of children from high risk families.
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