Federal Interagency Task Force on the Arts and Human Development

December 2011, 38 pages. National Endowment for the Arts, 1100 Pennsylvania Artery NW, Washington, DC 20506, (202) 682-5400, www.ars.gov

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Overview

Homo development describes a circuitous web of factors affecting the wellness and well-being of individuals across the lifespan. Together, these factors yield cognitive and behavioral outcomes that tin shape the social and economical circumstances of individuals, their levels of creativity and productivity, and overall quality of life.

Increasingly in the 21st century, U.Southward. policy leaders in health and education take recognized a need for strategies and interventions to accost "the whole person." They have urged a more integrated approach to policy development—one that can achieve Americans at various stages of their lives, across generations, and in multiple learning contexts.

The arts are ideally suited to promote this integrated approach. In study after study, arts participation and arts instruction have been associated with improved cerebral, social, and behavioral outcomes in individuals across the lifespan: in early childhood, in adolescence and young machismo, and in later years. The studies include:

• Neuroscience enquiry showing stiff connections between arts learning and improved cognitive development;
• Pocket-size comparison group studies revealing the arts' contributions to school-readiness in early babyhood;
• Longitudinal data analyses demonstrating positive academic and social outcomes for at-adventure teenagers who receive arts education; and
• Several studies reporting improvements in cognitive function and self-reported quality of life for older adults who engage in the arts and creative activities, compared to those who practise not.

This emerging body of evidence appears to support a need for greater integration of arts activities into health and educational programs for children, youth, and older adults. Yet further research is necessary so that policy-makers and practitioners tin can sympathise the pathways and processes by which the arts affect man development, thereby enhancing the efficacy of arts-based practices in optimizing health and educational outcomes for Americans of all ages.

NEA-HHS Collaboration

On March xiv, 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in partnership with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) hosted a convening in Washington, DC to showcase some of the nation's most compelling studies and evidence-based programs that have identified cerebral, social, and behavioral outcomes from arts interventions.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman gave keynote speeches, followed by senior officials representing the HHS Administration for Children and Families (ACF) and Administration on Aging (AoA). Representatives from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) as well participated. The NEA Office of Enquiry & Analysis organized the event.

Secretary Sebelius declared a common goal for the convening agencies: "We hope this meeting leads to deeper collaboration in research and in identifying new ways to engage the arts to ameliorate people's lives." Similarly, Chairman Landesman asked: "How do the arts help build united states of america as a people and every bit individuals?" The NEA and HHS, he said, "share a fundamental mission—how to meliorate the quality of life."

The resulting white paper proposes a framework for long-term collaboration among the NEA, HHS, and other federal agencies to build chapters for future research and evidence-sharing about the arts' role in human being development. A worthy aim of that collaboration is to foster data-driven models for including the arts in policies and programs that seek to improve the well-being of Americans at different stages of their lives.

Fundamental Enquiry Findings

Studies reported at the convening and elsewhere have measured cognitive, social, and behavioral development amongst arts participants and arts learners. The research applies to three pivotal sections of the lifespan:

Early Childhood

• 3- to v-yr-olds from depression socioeconomic status (SES) families demonstrated significant gains in nonverbal IQ, numeracy, and spatial cognition after they had received music preparation and attention grooming in a pocket-size-class setting—compared to a regular Head Commencement control group (Neville, et al. 2008).
• Students from low-income backgrounds who attended an "arts enrichment" preschool improved in school-readiness skills, more so after 2 years than after i year of program attendance. Children from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds benefited equally. In a related study by the aforementioned research team, students attention the arts enrichment preschool showed higher levels of linguistic communication development (measured past "receptive vocabulary") than did students who attended a comparison preschool (Brownish, Benedett, & Armistead 2010).
• Children attending a preschool that used an arts integration model fabricated greater developmental strides in multiple domains, including initiative, social relations, creative representation, music and movement, linguistic communication, literacy, and logic and mathematics, compared to children in a regular Head Start program (Social Dynamics, LLC 2005).

Youth and Adolescence

• Arts-engaged low-income students were more likely than their not-arts-engaged peers to nourish and exercise well in college, obtain employment, volunteer in their communities, and participate in the political process by voting. Study findings suggest that arts-engaged low-income students performed similarly to average higher-income students (Catterall 2009).
• Student beliefs, measured past numbers of suspensions and subject area referrals, improved in schools involved in an arts integration initiative, as did educatee attendance. Student bookish achievement too improved: seventh-class students in treatment schools significantly outperformed control-group students on state standardized tests in reading and math (Pittsburgh Public Schools ca. 2008).
• Students involved in after-school activities at arts organizations demonstrated greater use of complex language than did their peers. Students who were involved in arts didactics for at least ix hours a week were iv times more likely than their peers nationally to have won school-wide recognition for their academic achievement and 3 times more likely to have won an award for school attendance (Heath 1999).

Older Adults

• Older adults participating in a chorale plan reported college overall concrete wellness, fewer doc visits, less medication utilize, fewer instances of falls, and fewer health problems when compared to a command group. The chorale grouping also displayed evidence of higher morale and less loneliness than did the command group (Cohen, et al. 2006).
• Older adults participating in a structured theatrical intervention over four weeks significantly improved, compared to 2 control groups (a singing group and a no-treatment control group) in four cerebral measures: immediate word recall, problem-solving, verbal fluency, and delayed recall (Noice & Noice 2009).
• Older adults with Alzheimer's disease and those with related dementias who participated in a creative storytelling intervention became more engaged and more alert than those in a control group. There were more than frequent staff-resident interactions, peer social interactions, and social engagement in facilities using the creative storytelling intervention than in controlgroup facilities (Fritsch, et al. 2009).

Challenges and Opportunities

Although these findings are promising, convening participants agreed that a collective leap forward is necessary to a) replicate, extend, and bring such studies to scale and b) share the results with researchers, practitioners, and the general public. In detail, the post-obit challenges remain:

• A lack of coordination among federal bureau departments and investigators and practitioners from diverse disciplines (due east.one thousand., arts education, child development, medicine, nursing, educational psychology, cognitive neuroscience, the behavioral and social sciences) in pursuing a vigorous research agenda to understand the role of arts and arts didactics in man development.
• The small-scale size of report populations participating in research on the arts and human being development currently limits generalizability of the results. So far, the majority of reported studies rely on correlational data, rather than results from well-controlled trials. Another limiting cistron is the dearth of longitudinal studies.
• Depression visibility of research findings, program evaluation data, and evidence-based models integrating the arts in health and educational programs provided at various segments of the lifespan.

These needs take caused greater currency in light of recent demographic trends and domestic policy priorities. With a rise accomplice of highly agile infant-boomers facing retirement, opportunities for creative engagement and lifelong learning in the arts are likely to prove disquisitional for improved health and well-existence. Educators and communities, confronted with large percentages of Americans declining to cease high school, are seeking innovative and effective strategies to engage students and heave their achievement levels. In this climate, a stronger function for arts pedagogy should be investigated.

Finally, the high-club critical thinking and inventiveness skills that have been linked to arts training are deemed increasingly vital to today'southward workforce, the U.S. economy, and our nation'south overall competitiveness. At the convening, Mary Wright, a plan director with the Conference Lath, asserted: "Inventiveness and innovation are going to increase in importance."

Wright based her conclusion on recent manufacture surveys of employers' hiring needs. The results are clear: U.S. companies stand to gain from the cognition and skills that an arts education can provide. High demand among employers for inventiveness, innovation, and disquisitional thinking volition interpret into positive social and economic outcomes for workers who possess those skills, thus contributing more broadly to their homo development.

Recommendations

The moment is ripe for federal leadership in the design, behave, and dissemination of rigorous research and show-based practices documenting the arts' contributions to human development—from early childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood to middle-aged and older adults.

To support this leadership part, the post-obit deportment are recommended:

1. Establish a federal interagency job force to promote the regular sharing of research and information about the arts and human development.

The task strength would include loftier-level officials from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Section of Education, and HHS agencies such as the Administration for Children and Families, the Administration on Aging, and the National Institutes of Health. The group would convene 2 to three times a year to review progress on the following tasks:

• Host a series of webinars highlighting examples of compelling research and testify-based practices that have integrated the arts in man development. The webinars will be available to the public, but aimed especially at researchers and providers of the arts, health, and education for various segments of the lifespan.
• Coordinate the distribution of information about funding opportunities for researchers and providers of the arts, health, and education beyond the lifespan.
• Conduct or committee an inventory and gap analysis of federally sponsored research on the arts and human development then that time to come inquiry opportunities tin can exist developed past and beyond agencies, departments, and the individual sector.
• Develop an online clearinghouse of research and evidence-based practices that examine or utilize the arts in health and educational programs across the lifespan.

2. Convene a series of technical workshops to help develop inquiry proposals that stand for robust and innovative written report design methods to investigate the human relationship between the arts and man development.

If the almost competitive inquiry proposals are to reach the appropriate funders, both public and individual, then capacity-building through peer learning must occur. A serial of workshops would aid to amend the overall rigor of such studies, by recruiting outstanding scientists to tackle vexing and circuitous problems in pursuing this topic.

Because of formidable difficulties involved in mounting large-scale, longitudinal studies of the arts at piece of work in human development—and because of the complexity of written report blueprint factors related to different age populations—it is important to bring together research methodologists and content experts in neuroscience, health, education, and the arts to advance discussion of key topics, including:

• >What are advisable outcomes (including quality-of life indicators) for studies comparing arts interventions with control groups in the provision of health and/or educational services?
• How might successful randomization exist accomplished and comparison research designs developed for exploring the arts' potential bear upon, particularly on children and older adults?
• How can multifariousness in the report populations be promoted to ensure that findings about the arts and human development volition apply toward and thus potentially benefit all groups (i.e., individuals from all ages and racial/ethnic backgrounds, including those with disabilities)?
• How tin can artists and arts educators contribute fully to the planning and comport of research? What protocols and criteria should guide the administration of arts content and delivery?

3. Bring the arts to national and international conversations most integrating the concept of well-existence into policy development.

Fifty-fifty while new evidence is being gathered, the federal partnership should leverage growing national and international interest in using measures of subjective well-existence equally complementary and valuable tools to guide policy decisions. This discussion is highly consistent with the HHS strategic goal—"Advance the health, safety, and well-being of the American people." At the same time, greater analysis of the arts in directly human relationship to well-being will provide the NEA with an opportunity to realize 1 of its own strategic goals for the American people—"Promote public noesis and understanding about the contributions of the arts."

This recommendation also aligns with two National Establish on Crumbling-sponsored efforts to advance the measurement of subjective well-existence for application to research on aging and health. Those efforts include:

• Development of a National Research Council console on "measuring subjective well-beingness in a policy-relevant framework." This initiative, co-sponsored by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, was singled out by the White Firm in a May 25, 2011, joint fact sheet as having "the potential to generate new insights that will directly inform social and economical policies."
• A series of National Academies workshops that volition conclude in September 2012 with recommendations on the "evaluation of measures of subjective wellbeing and development of OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-performance and Development) guidance for national statistical agencies on the measurement of well-existence." The workshops should exist monitored for their potential applicability to future federal information collection nigh the arts' office in human development.

Ultimately, it may surprise no one to discover that arts and arts education accept potent positive effects on wellness and quality of life. Throughout human being history, in almost all cultures, the arts have been viewed equally a hallmark of civilization—so why non of health and human evolution?

Yet i thing is sure: without vigorous and all-encompassing research and evidence-sharing amid regime agencies, scientists, practitioners, and the general public, our nation will continue to lack constructive, replicable models for using the arts to ameliorate quality-of-life outcomes. The resulting deficiency represents a substantial loss for arts, health, and education providers serving Americans at all stages of life. The NEA-HHS partnership, through this white paper, endorses the timeliness and potential cost-effectiveness of the proposed collaborations and research endeavors.

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Source: https://www.giarts.org/article/arts-and-human-development

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