Does Studying the Arts Engender Creative Thinking? Evidence for Near but Not Far Transfer

The view that studying the arts makes people more creative and imaginative is part of our folklore. Arts education at its best includes open-ended inquiry, creative problem finding, and creative problem solving. It is reasonable to wonder, therefore, whether studying the arts helps develop creative skills that can be deployed in other areas besides the arts. This view has been put forth in qualified form by the psychologist David Perkins.' Perkins has argued that looking at art requires and can be used to cultivate thinking dispositions. He argues that while any subject matter can be used to foster skills, the arts are a particularly good vehicle for this. The arts are excellent vehicles for fostering because they provide a sensory anchor (one can focus on a physical object as one thinks), they are instantly accessible (one can check one's argument at any point by looking back at the work), they engage us and sustain our attention, and they encourage rich connections. However, he also points to evidence that skills developed in one context will transfer to another context only when there is explicit teaching for transfer. Teachers need to encourage students to see the common principles that connect in the arts to in other domains. What evidence do we have that learning in the arts leads to creative skills? We carried out a comprehensive search for empirical studies investigating this question. We limited our search to studies assessing