Can Improvisation Benefit Academic Resilience?

Presenter

Edward Cheng Zhou

Campus

UMass Amherst

Sponsor

Lisa Sanders, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, UMass Amherst

Schedule

Session 5, 3:30 PM - 4:15 PM [Schedule by Time][Poster Grid for Time/Location]

Location

Poster Board A76, Campus Center Auditorium, Row 4 (A61-A80) [Poster Location Map]

Abstract

Multiple lines of evidence suggest a relationship between creativity, mental health, and learning.  For example, some of the neural regions that are robustly engaged during creative pursuits, including Freestyle Rap and jazz improvisation, also support learning under challenging conditions. We recruited undergraduate students who are regular practitioners of improvisation (Improv) and students who have never practiced improvisation (No Improv) to measure the relationship between engaging in this particular form of creativity and the ability to maintain attention and learn from a monotonous lecture.  Three participants from the same group (Improv, No Improv) were tested together in the same session to encourage interaction.  Participants completed questionnaires about current and past improvisation, current situations that may be obstacles to academic success, and respective standardized measures of resiliency and creativity.  Next, participants engaged in a sustained attention task, Connor’s Continuous Performance, that requires button presses to rarely presented targets over an extended period of time. Finally, participants viewed a video of an academic lecture being read in a monotonous tone by a talking head with no other visuals and were asked open-ended questions about the content of the lecture.  We predict that Improv participants will score higher on the resilience questionnaire, detect more targets during the sustained attention task, and provide more detailed and original responses to the lecture questions, despite similar levels of obstacles to academic success.  Such a pattern of results would suggest that creative improvisation may be useful in supporting resilience and learning, and would motivate future randomized controlled trials with improvisation interventions.

Keywords

Improvisation, Learning, Resilience, Creativity, Boredom

Research Area

Psychology and Behavioral Sciences

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