When, Where, How Much, and for Whom? A Research Synthesis of Drama-Based Pedagogy on Student Outcomes

• In Event: Roundtable Session 121
  In Roundtable Session: Drama-Based Pedagogies in Teacher Education and Classroom Learning

Abstract

In their report released in 2011, the President’s Committee on Arts and Humanities refers to arts integration as “the most significant innovation in the field over the last two decades…” and calls for a better understanding of the dimensions of quality and best practices—when, for whom, what content areas, and what learning objectives are best served by arts-integration methods. One specific promising type of arts integration is drama-based instructional strategies. Since the most comprehensive research synthesis and meta-analysis (Kardash & Wright, 1986), numerous research reports have focused on drama-based strategies used in the curriculum; however, we do not have a clear idea of its overall effectiveness and, just as critical for implementation in classrooms, its limitations. This paper synthesizes the extant literature to assess the impact of drama-based instruction on student outcomes and to offer a nuanced understanding of how specific characteristics of the intervention, students or curriculum content may affect the impact of drama-based instruction.
Drama-based pedagogies describes a collection of teaching and learning strategies that seek to engage students in content-area instruction (e.g., language arts, science). Researchers and practitioners have diversely referred to these strategies as ‘applied theatre techniques’ (Cawthon & Dawson, 2009), ‘activating strategies’ (Wilhelm, 2002), ‘theatre games’ (Spolin, 1986), and ‘creative drama’ (McCaslin, 1999). All strategies invite the teacher and the students to co-construct meaning in a social context (Vygotsky, 1978), shifting the teacher role from “sage on stage” to “guide on the side” (King, 1993).
Using a broad set of search strategies, focused only on experimental control research designs, the researchers attempted to identify and retrieve the entire population of studies since 1985 that examine the relationship between drama-based pedagogies and student outcomes. Coders captured numerous characteristics of each study including: the type of research report, the research design, the drama-based pedagogy variable, the sample of students, the student outcome measure, and the estimate of the relationship between drama-based pedagogy and the outcome. For example, for the drama-based pedagogy variable, researchers coded the length of the intervention, the types of activities, the experience level of the facilitator, etc.
After applying similar criteria used to judge the validity of primary research (Cooper, Hedges, & Hedges; 2009), researchers identified 55 experimental reports that investigate the impact of drama-based pedagogy across 87 student outcomes (i.e., reading comprehension, attitudes toward people with disabilities). Preliminary findings suggest: a wider and more diverse usage of drama-based pedaogogies (i.e., conceptual mathematical understanding); larger and older sample populations (i.e., 47 % of the studies had n over 50 and 38% of the studies were with secondary to college students); and 70% of the 87 outcomes measured showed a positive effect by using drama-based strategies.
Affordances and limitations of drama-based pedagogies need to be understood and included in the discussion to allow for a clearer line of research and better implementation. This paper provides a nuanced understanding of drama-based instruction and provides critical insight for policy-makers and practitioners regarding how it may be most profitably used in the classroom to benefit students.

Author

• Bridget Lee, The University of Texas - Austin