Dr. Rauscher presented recent international research on the effects of music on the brain. After providing a summary of research suggesting that early music training influences brain development and cognition, Dr. Rauscher discussed the most recent findings from her ongoing research with kindergartners and Head Start preschoolers regarding music's effect on spatial-temporal abilities.

Dr. Eisner addressed the situation which arises when pressures upon arts education become severe: the tendency to justify the arts' existence by extravagant claims that often have little to do with what the arts are about. (The most recent salvo is related to what research supposedly says about the contributions of the arts to achievement in "academic" subjects.) Dr. Eisner's presentation examined the evidentiary basis for those claims and described how arts education might be constructively viewed in the context of American schools.

This paper expanded on Prof. Catterall's recent monograph titled "Involvement in the Arts and Success in Secondary School." The extended work examines student performance through grade 12; the analysis also explores involvement in music and mathematics achievement, as well as dramatic arts and communications skills.

The meaning and possibilities of any art are inseparable from the conditions under which it is generated and experienced. "School art" is no exception. In this paper, Dr. Bresler argued that improvement and effective reform are seldom born of merely goal-setting and standards-raising, but rather of intensive analysis of contexts, problems and experiences of participants, and careful delineation of areas susceptible to improvement. Hence the need to complement the philosophical and experimental arts education literature with research studies of the operational and experienced curricula, examining the micro, meso and macro contexts for arts education, and how they affect students' specific and general skills, achievements, and attitudes. The construction of a knowledge base grounded in school reality will facilitate dissemination to various interested communities and constituencies, including school practitioners and policy makers.