The VTS Difference Boosting performance by building on what comes naturally In just ten VTS lessons, spaced over a school year:         • All kids grow in thinking and language skills, visual literacy, and confidence. Research         shows VTS is especially effective with kids who struggle to learn.         • VTS is effective across cultural and language groups, and works well with students who         are challenged in many different ways.         • VTS addresses discrepancies in experience and exposure created by poverty and         disadvantage, significantly leveling the field.         • Teachers gain new skills at facilitating discussions, ones they transfer to other lessons,         affecting student performance to an even greater degree.         • Teacher and student morale improves as learning proves engaging for all.         • Students master complex skills extremely hard to teach. Elusive "higher level" standards         are met.         • Test scores improve, especially given questions involving images, reasoning, remembering         details, and drawing inferences.         • Dynamics among teachers shift, and a more collaborative environment is created.         • VTS is cost effective. Materials are inexpensive, the training regime for teachers efficient. The VTS effect. Sucessful schools demand that all kids succeed, and not just in basic skills. Our world requires people who can think, express themselves, create, and work together. VTS instills these abilities because it builds on kids' inherent strengths and on art's capacity to stimulate. And because it provides the right challenges at the right time.  ...practitioners of (VTS) are able to help students become remarkably competent visual and critical thinkers... I have watched children develop remarkably sophisticated vocabulary skills, and I have seen them apply these skills... in their writing and in their ability to understand and analyze the world around them. - Deborah Schwartz, former Vice Director for Education, Brooklyn Museum of Art The San Antonio Story In a three-year project with what was labeled an "at risk" population of low income, largely Hispanic students, VUE studied the effects of VTS on visual literacy and critical thinking. In the test site, all students had VTS taught by their classroom teachers. Another San Antonio elementary school was used as a control and its students were not exposed to VTS. The second school was matched in demographics and ethnicity, but had a smaller percentage of kids considered "at risk" of failure and more who had a command of English, the second language for most in both schools. In the tests given before the program began, the second school actually scored higher. At the end of three years, the differences were arresting. Even though the control students started out ahead, the kids in the VTS school significantly outperformed them in both areas, growth in visual thinking skills and in thinking. VUE researchers counted untis of critical thought and, against the odds, the experimental kids had double the numbers off those with no VTS. Even more surprising, the academically challenged San Antonio students also surpassed - by a similar margin - the performance of students in a middle class, white, rural community in Minnesota where VUE has just completed a five-year study. In other words, the benefits of VTS for poor kids who came to school speaking a language other than English and who were performing poorly on test were profound. VTS was shown to dramatically improve their thinking skills in time to support academic success, in part because of their increased confidence. The data convinced the San Antonio Independent School District to implement VTS system-wide. Although it is less acknowledged, visual literacy is essential to this increasingly image-dominated world, especially when images are used to manipulate. The capacity of kids with VTS experience to read a range of meaning in images greatly increases their ability to negotiate everything from art to ads. Still under study is the impact of VTS on language. VUE is in the process of collecting data to document changes in writing cited repeatedly by teachers. Preliminary findings suggest that the boost to language will be similarly deep.