The Eastern Suffolk, NY Board of Cooperative Education Services received a US DOE Arts In Education Model Development and Dissemination (AEMDD) grant for Creative Classroom Collaboratives (C3), a demonstration project designed to test the effects of the integration of performance arts into the elementary school curriculum from 2011-2012 through 2013-2014. In four treatment schools, professional artists are collaborating with classroom teachers and school arts and media specialists on arts-integrated curriculum units teaching literacy, social studies, and 21st Century skills to two cohorts of students from second through fourth grade. A quasi-experimental, longitudinal study is documenting implementation and measuring outcomes of treatment and comparison group participants. Preliminary results indicate treatment students made significant gains in each of the 21st Century skills targeted by the project—Creativity and Innovation, Collaboration, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, and Communication—overall and relative to the comparison group. Lessons learned from the evaluation emphasize the importance of responsiveness to and collaborations among all stakeholders. #artseducation #2013Conference #artsintegration #ArtsCultureandAudiences