Montana Standards for Arts.

Arts cultivate the whole child, building many kinds of literacy while developing intuition, reasoning, creativity, imagination, and dexterity into diverse forms of expression and communication. The arts enable students to make decisions and seek multiple solutions. They advance higher order thinking skills of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Arts education engages students in a creative process that helps them develop the self motivation, discipline, cooperation, and self-esteem necessary for success in life. The arts consist of dance, music, theater, and visual arts. Montana state content standards indicate what students should know, understand, and be able to achieve in a specific area. Performance standards descriptions provide a picture of student achievement at the four performance levels: (1) advanced, (2) proficient, (3) nearing proficiency, and (4) novice. Benchmarks define expectations for student knowledge, skills, and abilities along a developmental continuum in each content are. That continuum is focused at three points at the end of grades 4, 8, and 12. The six content standards are that students: (1) create, perform/exhibit, and respond in the arts; (2) apply and describe the concepts, structures, and processes in the arts; (3) develop and refine arts skills and techniques to express ideas, pose and solve problems, and discover meaning; (4) analyze characteristics and merits of their work and the work of others; (5) understand the role of the arts in society, diverse cultures, and historical periods; and (6) make connections among the arts, other subject areas, life, and work. (BT)