Beverly Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program: Report on Effective Practices and Barriers to Participation

The Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program (BTS Arts) provides arts-integrated instruction to elementary students across the state of Utah. The BTS Arts goal is to improve student outcomes, including in language arts, social studies, mathematics, and science (BTS Handbook, 2023). In September 2023, the University of Utah was awarded grant funding from the Utah State Board of Education to study the implementation practices, outcomes, and barriers to participation in BTS Arts.

The level of implementation of BTS Arts integration, as measured by the Assurance Survey, was strong in some areas but showed room for improvement in others. Most schools reported that all students at the participating school had access to BTS Arts, but 38-51% of schools with BTS Arts reported that students had fewer than 30 minutes of BTS Arts instruction per week. Collaboration between BTS Arts educators and classroom teachers was stronger for beginning-of-year sharing of curriculum maps, but weaker for regular meetings or classroom teacher participation during arts instruction.

The only significant relationship observed between BTS Arts implementation and student outcomes was that for every year that a school participated in BTS Arts, the school’s average score on math, reading, and science assessments increased between 0.023 and 0.027 standard deviations on the student-level assessment scale. This increase was statistically significant at p < .001 but is modest in size.

The BTS Barriers survey reveals that the primary barriers to participation in the BTS Arts program were 1) an inability to offer BTS Arts educators full-time employment and availability of school funding and 2) time for classroom teachers to co-plan, co-teach lessons, or engage in professional development with BTS Arts educators.

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