The Effects on Brain Structures, Social and Cognitive Skills in Children Exposed to the Guri Santa Marcelina Program in Greater São Paulo: A Quasi-Experimental Study v1
Authors: Bortz Graziela , Jackowski Andrea , Silva Lucio Patricia , Ilari Beatriz , Cogo-Moreira Hugo , Di Giuseppe Germano Nayana 
Published: February 2025

The question guiding this study is: how can participation in the Guri Santa Marcelina Program affect the development of social skills, cognitive abilities and brain structure in children aged between 6 and 7? Among the observational studies used in the health area, the quasi-experimental design verifies the causal relationship between exposure to a situation and the prognosis of an outcome. It has been widely used in research in situations where conducting a randomized control study would be unethical. This study will be used here for reasons inherent to the process of enrolling in the Program, prospectively throughout the 2020 school year, when data will be collected from the internal group (50 children) exposed to the Program and the control group (100 children, 50 of whom will be randomized to MRI), in order to measure, through this observation, the effects that the predictor (being exposed to the Program) has on the outcome variable (social and cognitive skills and changes in brain structure). Parents or guardians will sign the Informed Consent Form at the time of enrollment. The aims of this research are: 1) to evaluate the social effects of the Guri Santa Marcelina Program of the São Paulo State Department of Culture on children aged 6 and 7 in the communities served by the program using the ABEP economic classification criteria (2018), the SDQ questionnaire (Goodman & Goodman, 2011) of abilities and difficulties, the Questionnaire of Aggressive and Reactive Behaviors among Peers (Q- CARP; Borsa & Bandeira, 2014), verbal working memory (WISC-IV), concentrated, divided and sustained attention BPA (Rueda, 2013) and Raven’s Colored Matrices test (Raven, Raven, & Court, 2003); 2) to observe possible structural changes in the brains of children exposed to the intervention of the Guri Santa Marcelina Program in 6 and 7 year olds by means of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Results of research conducted on programs inspired by the Venezuelan project based on orchestral music teaching known as El Sistema showed a significant improvement in students’ academic performance when compared to the control group (Holochwost et al., 2017b), cognitive (Habibi et al., 2016), socio-emotional and musical (Ilari et al., 2016). Similar results in a study conducted by Alemán et al. (2016) corroborate the behavioral benefits of children exposed to social vulnerabilities. In Brazil, although there are several social music education projects (Ação Social pela Música do Brasil - ASMB in Chapéu Mangueira, Alemão, Macacos, Cidade de Deus, Piraí, João Pessoa, Rondônia, Neojibá in Bahia, Projeto Guri in the interior and coast of São Paulo, Instituto Baccarelli, formalized in 1996 in the city of São Paulo, and Guri Santa Marcelina in Greater São Paulo), there are no quantitative studies or studies that have used imaging exams to measure the prognosis that exposure to social programs focused on music education presents as an outcome.