Lessons Learned: The power of arts-based evaluation 

Kirah Caminos, Director of Arts Education

Christell and I recently returned from the Young Audiences National Conference. It is always inspiring to attend that Conference, to connect with our peers from around the country, to hear and witness the newest and most promising work being done around the US. This year, it was a special honor to present our recent innovative work around arts- based evaluation.  

Our work tackles the enormous question of how do we adequately evaluate the work we do. Quantitative evaluation continues to reign supreme with most funders and stakeholders, but isn’t always the best fit; while it’s useful to know that we provided nearly 84,000 hours of programming last year, that number doesn’t do anything to describe how our work changed these students’ lives. Drawing from the work of Harvard’s Project Zero, we started with the idea that arts-based evaluation would be the best way to capture the true power of our work. We built an evaluation approach rooted in the visible thinking routines of “I see, I think, I wonder,” linking these with the STEM habits of observing, collective, and interpreting data, and pilot tested our arts-based evaluation strategy in our 2025 Summer STEAM program. In our pilot, we approached evaluation as a hands-on, multi-sensory, arts-based activity that kept participants connected to one another as they processed multiple individual and group insights, reflections and meaning. This approach resulted in arts products and data narrative that spoke directly to the ways our program advanced student learning AND shaped “habits of mind.” 

In our session at the National Conference we shared the nuts and bolts of this approach and then provided participants the chance to engage in “making learning visible” themselves, using the second half as a time for attendees to form into small groups and create an arts-product that reflected what the group had learned in the first half of the session. The power of this approach became clear as participant discussions quickly took off, group members sharing their own insights and reinforcing those of others, resulting in “ah-ha” moments around the room both about the material we presented and the power of this way of approaching evaluation. It was an honor and a pleasure to share our work and we are excited to continue evolving this approach to evaluation over the coming year!