The interrelationships between learning in certain forms of music instruction and the development of cognitive skills such as spatial reasoning appear incontrovertible in light of a number of studies in the Compendium. But once again Scripp in his essay urges researchers and practitioners to probe deeply into the particularities of these relationships and argues strongly for the development of new forms of music instruction that he feels will advance at one and the same time both music and related learning.

Another fruitful line of future inquiry would be to build on the studies and the suggestions of commentators and essayists to clarify the habits of mind, social competencies, and personal dispositions that are inherent to arts learning and to explore the application of these qualities in other realms of learning and life. Horowitz and Webb-Dempsey most directly address this issue in their multi-arts essay, but variations on the theme can be found in all layers of the Compendium. In part this is a matter, they say, of continuing to develop "better and more creative research designs" that probe the complexity of the arts learning experience, and also take into account the contexts in which the learning occurs. More richly textured qualitative studies—comparable to many of those in this Compendium—are the necessary prelude to clarifying the questions and directions for subsequent inquiry, including controlled experimental studies. But at issue as well, and well illustrated in the Compendium commentaries and essays, is the need for a lexicon of descriptive terms that authentically capture the arts learning experience while at that same time suggesting an array of interactions with other realms of learning and life—a lexicon that may blunt the debate between "intrinsic" and "instrumental" arts learning. For instance, individual studies invoke terms such as "theorizing" (developing theories to predict the consequences of actions); "persistence and resilience" (the capacity to sustain focused attention and to surmount distractions, setbacks, or frustration), and "respect for authentic achievement" to describe fundamental aspects of arts learning and art making. Terms such as these prompt us to explore the interrelationships between these abilities and attitudes as they are brought into play or produced in the context of arts learning and in other academic, personal, and social contexts and situations. So the term "theorizing" may comprise a "constellation" of mental processes that are cultivated and strengthened by application in disparate contexts including the arts. The essays urge us to explore that possibility.

Bradley, Catterall, and Baker in their separate essays on dance, drama, and visual arts, also have language on their minds, specifically the lack of consistency of usage within the art forms. Bradley in her essay on the studies of dance argues, "a common language from dance theory is critical to the future rigor and robustness of dance research… The grammar of movement is inherent in dance style and technique," but verbal expressions of this grammar need to be codified and used to undergird both instructional practice and research. Her candidate for a useful model is Laban Movement Analysis. Similarly, Catterall urges researchers and practitioners engaged with drama and theater to agree on a basic set of terms; he offers some potential definitions. Baker tackles the vexing question of how "art" itself should be defined and urges researchers to at least adopt and articulate an operational definition in their studies.

Given their perspective that learning in the arts—and its relationship to other learning—is complex and interactive, the essayists also argue strongly, even passionately, for the development and acceptance of forms of assessing teaching and learning that respect and reveal that complexity. They repeatedly make the point that knowing the full range of effects of arts learning requires assessment instruments that can validly and reliably identify and measure the outcomes of arts instruction. Discerning the impact of that learning in other domains requires instruments other than the currently available tests of reading and math achievement. The argument is not just that these tests are not sensitive to the effects of arts learning, but that they also are not adequate to assess the complexity of language and mathematical learning themselves, which, the essayists contend, are interwoven with the cognitive and affective processes of other domains, including the arts. They urge the development of new forms of assessment in all domains. Current forms, which assess only a limited range of content and skill, may divert curriculum and instruction away from more authentic and enriching learning.

Catterall makes a related argument that the technology of achievement assessment current in education, largely centered on reading and mathematics, also defines the educational research agenda and studies that are published. Among the effects, he argues, is a concentration of studies—in the arts and other domains—on young children in the elementary grades where data from standardized tests are most readily available. A corollary is that researchers and evaluators of the arts feel compelled to use these instruments and data, which have professional standing, to determine the impact of the arts—a severe limitation on arts education research of the kind advocated by the essayists.

With these views and perspectives, the essayists place themselves—and the arts—firmly within current discussions and debates about the education policies and practices that will best bring about school reform and improvement and high achievement for students. They make a strong case for the importance of arts learning. And they urge their colleagues in arts research and education to strengthen their contributions to these discussions by following leads and implications found in this Compendium.

Table of content Critical Links:

Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development

Appendix VI

Critical Links:

METHODS

The authors claim an exhaustive search of computer databases, references in literature, recommendations from primary researchers, and searches through identified joumals resulted in 3,714 potentially relevant studies. From these, the authors selected seven studies that could be examined using their meta-analytical technique. Those selected had quantified outcomes in the area of dance and cognition, used control groups, and were conducted on non-impaired populations. All of the selected studies were unpublished. Eliminated were those studies that were primarily deemed to be articles of advocacy, those articles that were teacher testimonies, studies in which students self-selected for dance, any studies that were deemed co-relational, and those studies whose outcomes were affective or physiological.

A first and second coder read the seven studies, with a resulting 12 percent rate of disagreement on 100 coding decisions. Any coding disagreements were subsequently resolved and were coded as to: Year of Publication/Outlet, Outcome, Sample Size, Design, Type of Dance Instruction, Type of Control Instruction, Duration, Intensity, Participant Age, and Participant Characteristics. The studies were analyzed within the two categories of Reading Abilities and Non-Verbal Reasoning. One study [Von Rossburg-Gempton, 1998) tested two populations (senior citizens and young children), and so effects were calculated for each population tested. The meta-analysis conflated the factors across the four studies in each category, with a resulting array of statistics that are extensive but ultimately uninformative.—K.B.

RESULTS

The meta-analysis of the four studies reporting reading outcomes found a small average effect, which increased (doubled) when weighted by sample size. Larger sample sizes produced more positive correlations. However, the range of both effect sizes and the varied tests for significance (there were two) on such a small number of sample sizes provided the authors with the argument for a weak effect overall. The heterogeneity of the studies weakens the validity and reliability of the meta-analysis.

The meta-analysis of the cohort of three studies reporting nonverbal reasoning effects found a much clearer positive correlation between dance experiences and nonverbal reasoning skills. The studies reporting nonverbal effects were more homogeneous than the reading studies. They yielded a greater degree of reliability and validity (r=17, three more studies required to bring results to significance).

Discussion of the results includes the authors' understanding that future dance studies in which cognitive outcomes are part of the desired effect should be more rigorous, should be set up to preclude teacher expectancy effects, should separate out motivational factors, and should be of a sufficient sample size.—K.B.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

The study is a meta-analysis of seven research projects in dance. The studies span a period of 26 years and vary greatly in sample size, measurement techniques, and dance activities applied as variables.

The use of meta-analysis on a mere seven studies, and the fact that these studies were found in what is described as an exhaustive search of eight databases, journals, bibliographies, and requests to researchers, indicates that the authors believe that research in dance education is in its infancy. Research studies that utilized anecdotal reports or in which students self-selected for dance were eliminated. Recommendations are made for more studies, more empirical studies, and a more uniform use of quantitative research methodology across all studies in the future.

This is the first meta-analysis of the dance education field. In that, its main contribution to the field is that it highlights the limits of meta-analysis on such a small sample size—K.B.

COMMENTARY

Of the seven studies included in this meta-analysis four examined the effect of dance instruction on reading skills and three on nonverbal reasoning. However, the small number of studies, the variation in dance instruction in each study, and the large gap between early and later studies (16 to 18 years) make it difficult to draw any significant conclusions. This temporal gap is especially worrisome in light of the positive results for the two more recent studies in reading effects (Seham 1997 and Rose 1999); these positive results disappear in the meta-analysis discussion.

Statistical analysis were used to determine the size of the effect as well as whether the effect was positive, null, or negative. Meta-analysis can be more useful than a mere electoral approach (i.e., simply counting up the number of studies with a positive effect, a null effect, or a negative effect) because sample size can be accounted for in determining the probability level for a particular effect. The problem with meta-analysis is that the conflation of numbers ceases to be useful when comparing different types of experiences and variables, especially in small numbers of studies. And, in the end, we only know that any numbers are highly questionable. Guidance for dance educators and researchers is difficult to elicit from such a meta-analysis. Within the meta-analysis, the authors criticize studies where there has been an overt facilitation of transferability by a teacher. The authors ascribe to the belief that if teachers know they are trying to improve reading skills through dance, causality cannot be proven since the teachers may be "signaling" the desired results to the students. Yet good teaching is often about clearly signaling the direction of the expectations. Just such a phenomenon was cited in the meta-analysis discussion as a reason why positive results were suspicious in the Rose study (1999). "…[T]he teachers of the dance group were aware of the hypothesis that dance should improve reading. Thus, those teachers may have taught reading in a more enthusiastic and engaging manner than those teaching the control group." (Keinanen et al., p. 300)

But a more major concern with the meta-analysis, as with a number of other studies in this Compendium, is the failure to distinguish the content of the variable "dance instruction." In the seven studies that met the authors' test for inclusion, the type of instruction was defined under one of three categories: (1) instrumental dance instruction (making letter shapes with one's body, etc.), (2) creative dance instruction (problem-solving, divergent-thinking experiences), and (3) traditional dance instruction (technique class). But that categorization is not meaningful to dance education researchers because often the instrumental use of dance activities is indistinguishable from creative dance instruction. Studies are needed that examine the effects of each of the experiences inherent in dance (technique, improvisation, performance, and composition) and also the interrelationship among their effects. The selection of studies for the meta-analysis does not provide a complete picture of the range of dance instruction and experiences, which would be needed to draw conclusions about the academic and social effects of dance.

Dance education researchers differentiate among experiences in performance, composition, improvisation, and technique. In one study cited (Seham 1997), students at the National Dance Institute (Jacques D'Amboise's school) improved significantly on all scores for cognitive learning against a control group that received no special program, but it is unclear whether the dance classes affected overall concentration and focus as opposed to affecting reading scores. The positive influence of dance technique classes on learning across the board leads the authors to criticize the research rather than encouraging a closer look into the instrumental aspects of a dance technique program. Intensive study in the discipline of dance might lead to increased focus and concentration, and that would be highly instrumental. The error belongs both to the author of the original study (Seham 1997), because the content of the classes was not clearly defined, and to the use of the data within the original study by Keinanen et al. because the meta-analysis is comparing what may be vastly different types of experiences and drawing conclusions about overall effects on reading scores—K.B.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

The value of this work is its careful and comprehensive review of the entire research field (including published and unpublished work), uncovering 3,714 studies that investigated the effects of dance on student learning in non-dance areas.

The research used a widely accepted technique, meta-analysis, allowing the authors to assess the aggregate contribution of multiple studies that employed a range of student reading and reasoning measures, as well as varied statistical techniques.

The most important contribution, beyond the fact that this is the first systematic review across all the research on this topic, is simply that only a handful of studies met the researchers' standards for acceptable scientific rigor. The clear message is that the field needs more research—B.W.

COMMENTARY

The researchers found only four studies meeting their strict standards of acceptable research that investigated the relationship between dance instruction and reading skills and three studies that assessed reasoning skills. The former group of four studies included a total sample of only 527 students while the latter group of three studies involved only 188 students. So, in almost 50 years of research only 715 students have been exposed to carefully designed experimental treatments on the learning effects of dance. One obvious response is to decry the lack of controlled research in this field. It is also not unreasonable to argue that such a small sample hardly qualifies for such sophisticated quantitative analysis.

The more appropriate point is, perhaps, that the medical/agricultural model upon which these standards for meta-analysis are derived is not necessarily the best one from which to understand the complex endeavor of education or more specifically dance education. The varied contexts in which instruction is delivered, even from classroom to classroom in the same building, make it difficult to meaningfully transfer successes in controlled experimental settings to messy classrooms.

While it is important to understand the value that dance can add to students' cognitive skills, it is just as important (if not more so) to know the how and why dance contributes to learning, as well as the organizational and instructional conditions that allow arts learning to help students become more successful students. Thus, the 3,714 studies should also be mined to learn what the many qualitative studies can add to these important questions—B. W.

"…a more concern with the meta-analysis…is the failure to distinguish the content of the variable 'dance instruction.'"

METHODS

Seventy-eight seventh-grade girls without previous dance experience took 45-minute classes in either creative (n=38) or traditional (n=38) dance twice a week for eight weeks (total of 15 sessions). Groups were intact classes from one neighborhood middle school (heterogeneous SES) in Seoul, Korea.

The programs are described in detail in the text and in appendices. The traditional program was taught in three five-week blocks of modern, ballet, and Korean traditional dance, by teachers who selected the style, and who designed and taught the segments consecutively The creative program was designed and taught by the researcher for all 15 sessions.

The study employed a quasi-experimental, pre- and post-test, nonequivalent control group design. The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) Figural Forms A and B (counterbalanced by group and test administration) were used as pre- and post-tests for creative thinking. Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices were used as pre- and post-tests for critical thinking. The tests were selected for their high reliabilities, long histories, and nonverbal forms (to match the nonverbal dance medium). Tests were administered by trained proctors blind group and hypothesis and scored by a psychologist. In addition, students responded to a pre-course interview and in three written reflections after the fifth, 10th, and last class sessions. Qualitative data were analyzed by procedures outlined by Miles and Huberman, Waller and Romey, and Yin, including creating data arrays, constructing categorical matrices, making flow charts of relationships, constructing frequency distributions, and ordering data chronologically.

Analysis of quantitative results checked assumptions and employed independent t tests on gain scores (post-test - pre-test) and ANCOVAs (covarying pre-test scores), Bonferroni adjustments were made to control Type I errors (i.e., erroneously finding a positive effect), and alpha level was set at p < .01. Clear tables report descriptive and inferential data, and text reports exact ts and ps for some comparisons, although not for non-significant ones (which are important, since p = .02, a high probability, is a very different finding from p = .49, which is a probability essentially equivalent to chance).—L.H.

RESULTS

Of four hypotheses, three were supported by the quantitative analysis: (1) subjects in traditional dance instruction did not make significant gains in creative or critical thinking, (2) subjects in creative dance did make significant gains in creative and critical thinking, and (3) subjects in creative dance had significantly greater gains in creative thinking than subjects in traditional dance. The fourth hypothesis was not supported: (4) subjects in creative dance did not gain significantly more in critical thinking than subjects in traditional dance instruction. However, the trend in critical thinking was toward the creative group (Creative Mean gain = 202; Traditional Mean gain = .97, equivalent to a moderate effect size of r = 21. equivalent to d = 42). Thus, while the hypothesis was not supported, the creative dance program did enhance subjects' abilities to think critically to a moderate degree.

The qualitative analysis demonstrated that students' assumptions about dance changed, depending on the type of dance instruction they experienced. This suggests the importance of program type and quality, because these factors affect learning. Thus, decisions about program goals need to be made carefully to support the intended aims of the program—LH.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study combines rigorous quantitative and qualitative methods to explore a relatively unstudied and important question about transfer from dance instruction to higher order thinking skills.

Quantitative analysis showed gains on four components of creative thinking (originality, elaboration, flexibility, and fluency) for subjects in creative dance instruction. These same students did not improve in critical thinking from pre to post-test (but see Results section). A control group who studied traditional dance (modern, ballet, and Korean traditional) made gains only in the "fluency" component of creative thinking and not in critical thinking skills.

Qualitative analysis provided insight into students' perceptions of their dance experiences. Students in the creative dance instruction saw dance as requiring thought, intelligence, and problem-solving and as related to everyday life, while those in traditional instruction made none of these connections and saw dance as a means to a beautiful body and health—L.H.

COMMENTARY

This study suggests that when dance is taught as creative problem-solving, students' creative thinking skills improve. When it is taught as a series of steps to be replicated, creative thinking skills do not develop. In other words, the type of dance instruction appears to affect both what is learned in dance and what transfers to higher-level thinking.

Future research should compare programs of creative dance in which one group receives a program focused on creative problem-solving, similar to the program described here, and another employs creative problem-solving with the addition of deliberate bridging to the critical thinking used in a target subject.

This study would be an excellent model to replicate because of its rigor, focus on higher-order thinking, and clear reporting (numerous descriptions and appendices offer details about programs, methods, and data). Replicating within the United States would be informative, especially with subjects of various ages and abilities (gifted in dance, gifted in academics, at risk, or behaviorally disordered). Varying subjects' ethnicity and socio-economic backgrounds, and matching traditional dance forms to subjects' cultural backgrounds, would also provide useful information—L.H.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

The study is vastly comprehensive, including a fairly complete review of the literature of the early theorists in dance education from Laban to Murray to Mettler to Fleming to Russell to Anne Green Gilbert. But the author does not recognize the relationships of some of the theorists to Laban—particularly Russell, Boorman, and Preston-Dunlop. The author does not take into account that these approaches are based on Laban's theories and that Laban's theories permeate many of the other approaches as well. Therefore, while the review of the literature is broad, it is not organized into any meta-theory of creative dance. The author does not discuss how these theories informed her own creative dance classes (described later in the study), nor does she distinguish between teacher-centered and child-centered approaches to creative dance. She assumes that all creative dance approaches are child-centered, which is not necessarily the case.

Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of data provide a complete view of what was accomplished over the 15 sessions in creative movement and traditional dance forms. The results revealed that creative dance classes could indeed foster creative thinking, but not necessarily critical thinking skills. The permutations of the quantitative analysis are impressive, but the qualitative analysis actually reveals more specific information about what worked and what didn't work over the eight weeks. The content of both sets of classes is scrupulously documented, providing the opportunity to replicate the study in places other than Korea, with different age groups and utilizing different forms of traditional dance.

The author reports the responses of the participants in honest detail, including the remarks the participants made about being bored and embarrassed by the creative dance classes. She goes on to aggregate the responses demonstrating that ultimately, the creative dance group had a more positive and subjective appreciation of dance and the traditional dance group a more objective and detached view of dance—K.B.

COMMENTARY

It is not unreasonable that the creative dance classes yielded an increase in creative thinking skills. The long shot was that creative dance classes would improve critical thinking skills. While Kim does not explore the body of literature on transference of learning from one modality to another, she was seduced by the claims that early theorists and scholars made about the potential for dance to influence or develop critical thinking skills. These early scholars did not do rigorous investigation of their claims, but wrote rich and broad descriptions of what it appeared was happening when children moved creatively. As cognitive science and the scholarship of teaching and learning have uncovered more about the brain, mind, and body connections, the theorists Kim based her thesis on appear quaint and naïve.

Kim also fell into a dichotomy within the field of dance education that the field needs to move beyond. The notion that traditional, teacher-centered dance classes will not yield creative or critical thinking skill development, while creative dance (which is "student-centered") will bring all good things is a trap. In this study, the traditional dance group did increase in one of the four categories of creative thinking skills: that of fluency of thinking. There are indications in this and other studies relating dance to creative thinking skills that movement or dance alone may enhance fluency.

The conflation of creative and critical thinking processes leads her to expect that creative dance experiences would enhance both and dance technique classes would enhance neither. The weakest part of the study occurs early in the dissertation, when she infers that because "thinking always involves both creative and critical processes," these functions must therefore always work together. However, in testing for the two kinds of thinking, she was compelled to utilize two different pre- and post-tests; suggesting that so far we haven't figured exactly how the two functions work together, or even if they do.

It is important to eliminate the dichotomous thinking about the content of dance classes and determine what dance technique, dance improvisation, dance composition, and dance performance do influence in regard to creative and critical thinking skills. One can imagine that composing a dance piece, refining it, and performing it might foster more closed-ended cognitive activity than explorative and open-ended improvisation. Kim had the creative dance students compose a dance in the last week of the classes, but there was no time to refine or perform it, much less test for effect.

The age and culture of the students clearly influenced the results, something Kim does explore in her paper. The seventh-graders were shy and withdrawn and therefore tentative about the creative process. Seventh-graders would bring a particular self-consciousness to any process, no matter what their culture of origin. The value of respect for authority that is more ingrained in Korean culture may have aided the research. Even though the girls felt comfortable enough to share their negative feelings with the teacher-researcher, they were cooperative and willing. One might imagine different results from a population of ninth-grade boys or second-grade mixed-gender groups.—K.B.

METHODS

Two boys participated, aged 7 and 10 years. The boys were selected from a pool of five children living at a residential treatment home. Selection was based or their 90 percent participation in the program. The boys' individual diagnoses and behavioral disorders were described, but no references were made to the cultural contexts of their families (e.g., race, ethnicity, SES).

The program integrated creative movement and poetry stimuli, and the boys participated in 16, 50-minute sessions over a period of 10 weeks. Sessions had a consistent three-part structure, each part of which was described clearly: (1) an introduction and warm-up, (2) movement to a poem ("the heart of the lesson"), and (3) closure. The movement and poetry segment involved reading the poem aloud twice while the boys read along, the boys creating individual movement sequences for lines they each selected, and then sharing their movement sequences. By the fourth session, the boys began writing and creating movement for original poetry they "spontaneously spoke" and recorded on cassettes, which was later compiled into a booklet for each child, A behavior management reward system (tokens) that was used throughout the residential program was also incorporated into the program.

The study design was qualitative, and it was well conducted, analyzed, and reported.

Data were collected and analyzed from four sources:

(1)Anecdotal Recordings by two observers, trained prior to data collection. The observers alternated which child they observed for each session. They recorded observations chronologically within sessions to capture program information (progression of content) and the children's behaviors and verbalizations. Observations were summarized collaboratively by the principal investigator and observers after each session and then coded for (a) creative behavior (operationalized as originality, fluency, and flexibility, after Torrance), (b) unexpected outcomes, and (c) external factors. Originality = number of movements unique to the individual. Fluency = number of movements. Flexibility = number of definite changes in movement quality (force, direction, level, or shape).

(2)Observational Checklists. Sessions were videotaped, and two observers were trained prior to viewing by clarifying definitions and concepts and completing the creativity checklist (which tracked originality, fluency, and flexibility, as defined above) for a child from the home who was not one of the two subjects. Each observer's agreement with the principal investigator was r ≥. 85. Then the observers completed checklists for eight (50 percent) randomly selected and ordered sessions of one child, which they viewed independently until satisfied, about accuracy.

(3)Questionnaires/Interviews. Open-ended questionnaires were conducted with four staff members and the two observers, one week after the study. The questionnaires examined four general areas: (a) program success, (b) learning, (c) behavior changes, and (d) needed program changes. Open-ended interviews with the subjects, conducted and audiotaped by the principal investigator one week after the study, included the same general areas as the questionnaire (through the question: What does poetry mean to you?) and an additional supplementary area, feelings: (a) how feelings about poetry had changed from beginning to end of the program, (b) how the boys felt about moving with other children, and (c) what feelings arose when the boys moved to their Favorite poem. Data from both sources were transcribed, coded, and summarized by the investigators into the four categories plus a "miscellaneous comments" category for comments that did not otherwise fit

(4)Children's Original Poems. From the fourth session on, children created and spontaneously "spoke" their poems into an audiocassette. The poems were transcribed into booklets for each child. They were analyzed as "unexpected outcomes" and described according to creativity variables, representative topics, and overall characteristics.

Data sources contributed uniquely and also reinforced each other through triangulation, which affords verification and clarification of results. Anecdotal records were most helpful in understanding program outcomes—L.H.

RESULTS

Three general results were reported for these two behaviorally disordered children: (a) the boys demonstrated all three creativity variables to varying degrees, (b) growth was both shared and individual: both boys gained interest in poetry, one gained social behavior skills, the other gained motor coordination skills, and (c) both boys enjoyed the program.

The Study generated the foundation for testable hypotheses (along four dimensions) for further study of this research question.

(1)Areas of Learning: (a) independent thinking skills, (b) motor coordination, (c) body and spatial awareness, (d) verbal and physical expression of thoughts and feelings, (e) body knowledge, (f) awareness of dance elements;

(2)Behavior Changes: (a) willingness to participate in new activities, (b) positive group participation, (c) appropriate participation, (d) overcoming inhibited expression;

(3)Program Changes: (a) extend over longer time, (b) increase importance of token system, (c) increase time for poetry writing per session, (d) focus more on reflection of feelings in both movement and poetry;

(4)Study Design: (a) interview more frequently during the program (at least three times) to develop trust earlier, (b) continue to emphasize detailed anecdotal records—L.H.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study is exemplary in its qualitative methods and reporting. The article describes the program and study clearly, and it offers both program modifications and hypotheses to test in future research.

The study suggests that, when combined, poetry and movement may contribute to engagement, development of creativity, and social and/or motor learning in children with behavioral disorders. —L.H.

COMMENTARY

The study is a model of qualitative work. It affords a fine grained analysis of two children by triangulating four sources of data for validity: anecdotal records, observational checklists from videotaped sessions, questionnaires and interviews; and student work (poetry produced by the subjects}. The authors report their findings in multiple formats (text, graphs, lists of hypotheses for future qualitative or quantitative research), and specify that their results apply only to these two boys and to future research questions. The authors are also careful to ensure and assess reliability and reduce bias by defining terms in measurable ways, by training observers, by randomizing session selection and order for coding, and by alternating which child is observed by which observers for each session.

Future research should explore the categories defined as outcomes by this study and replicate its careful methods and judicious reporting.—L.H.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This case study of two boys is quite complete and revealing about creative thinking and the particularities of the two boys' learning styles. Qualitative data collection is well documented and supported with citations from previous studies using similar techniques. Both boys were able to develop a portfolio of poems written from movement, indicating that improvisational dance from a linguistic stimulus can generate original thoughts with a degree of fluency.—K.B.

COMMENTARY

The study adds to the growing body of literature about creative thinking and what characterizes it. There are specific descriptions of behaviors associated with the creative thinking attributes of fluency, flexibility, and originality with both movement and writing examples.

A statement in the Discussion section of the study raises an area for further exploration in the field of dance education research. The authors reflect on the lack of emotional or affective images in the poems written by the two boys and speculate that greater attention on identifying and applying feelings to the process of writing poetry might extend creative output. More studies that address the inclusion of affective variables in cognitive skill development are needed, especially in dance, where the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains are so well synthesized. The authors go on to conclude that since one boy improved more in social behavior and the other in motor coordination, the union of creative movement and poetry writing provided a "stronger fabric" for development, especially for children of different and challenging learning styles.

The authors also state that the most useful data for understanding the outcomes the boys achieved came from the anecdotal records. The field needs to recognize that movement analysis may offer the clearest depiction of what cognitive or behavioral changes occur through involvement in dance—K.B.

"The study suggests that, when combined, poetry and movement may contribute to engagement, development of creativity, and social and/or motor learning in children with behavioral disorders."

METHODS

Two hundred eighty-six high school students (15 years old, on average) who were enrolled in dance (experimental group) and non-dance (untreated control group) courses participated. Students studied under six dance teachers in beginning and advanced courses for a wide range of dance forms. Dancers participated for about five to eight hours a week, in and out of school, for a semester. Controls attended classes in business accounting, English, health, interpersonal communications, and psychology.

Experimental and Control subjects were pre- and post-tested in groups on the three parts of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), Figural Form A: picture construction, picture completion, and creation of recognizable objects. The test is fairly reliable: inter-rater reliability (r = .66-r = .99); retest reliability (r = .60-r = 70). TTCT is norm-referenced on five factors: fluency (number of ideas), originality (novelty of ideas), abstractness of titles (imaginative titling that captures the essence of a drawing), elaboration (detail identification), and resistance to premature closure (completing figures in non-simplistic ways). Because subjects were assigned random identification numbers by instructors, responses were scored blind by the investigator, which is a strength of the study. Group equivalence at pre-test was determined by a t test. Repeated measures of ANOVA on change scores were computed for experimentals vs. controls for all subjects and by school for each of the six schools. Finally, pre- and post-test scores were correlated with four indices of commitment and experience with dance: previous dance training, current dance instruction outside of school, total dance experience, and hours dancing per week.—L.H.

RESULTS

Elaboration, originality, and abstractness of titles correlated with higher levels of dance experience (results are presented in bar graphs, without specific values). It is puzzling that patterns of effect across factors of the TTCT are inconsistent, with different schools demonstrating significant differences (p < .05) for different creativity factors. The author reasonably suggests that the variation may result from differences in teachers or in school cultures—variables that should be assessed in future studies. Although results are compromised by potential selection bias (and can only be generalized to high school students who choose dance classes), there is evidence against an interpretation that higher creativity scores resulted because those who took dance started out more creative: dancers scored lower, on average, on pre-tests for all five creativity factors. Thus, it is not likely that the creativity gains resulted from a more creative group in the dance treatment but, rather, from the dance instruction itself,—L.H.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study suggests a possible relationship between dancing and improved ability to consider multiple perspectives. Such flexible thinking is useful in a range of disciplines.

The study finds that high school students who studied a variety of styles of dance for a semester scored better than non-dancers on the elaboration, originality, and abstractness of titles factors of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking.

This study also models an experimental design that allows reliable conclusions about transfer to be drawn. Experimental designs establish the direction of effect, in this case, from dance instruction to the outcome measure of creative thinking,—L.H.

COMMENTARY

Dancers in this study are more likely than students who did not receive dance instruction to employ creative thinking of the type measured by three factors assessed by the Torrance Test of Creativity. The study thus supplies empirical support for a belief that dance teaches divergent thinking.

The study does not assess or assert, however, how likely the dancers would be to use these thinking skills in, for example, history or science classes. That is possible, but not likely, since cognitive transfer across subjects is difficult to achieve (see Salomon, G. & Perkins, D. N. [1989], Rocky roads to transfer: Rethinking mechanisms of a neglected phenomenon. Educational Psychologist. 2A[2], 113-142). Generally, skills are employed in contexts similar to those in which they are learned. In this case, the tests were administered at the start of a dance class, which may have helped subjects use what they had learned in dance more readily in the testing context than they would in other subjects or classes.

Future research should investigate whether creativity in specific disciplines (e.g., science, history) can be fostered through dance programs, explore how teacher behaviors affect the creativity factors enhanced (what makes a quality dance teacher or experience?), and employ multiple, situated measures of creativity, rather than just paper-and-pencil tests.—L.H.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

The study indicates that dance is a valid way for students to develop creative thinking skills, especially in the categories of originality and abstract thinking. The data are well decoded, and the study is a model for quantitative analysis in the field.—K.B.

COMMENTARY

The dance students studied an array of dance styles and approaches. Further research needs to tease out whether movement improvisation and/or choreography affect creativity to a greater or lesser degree than a dance technique class, where expectations are much clearer and the teachers directly model outcomes.

Whether dancers can utilize their original and abstract-thinking skills in other disciplines is an additional area of exploration for future researchers. Studies such as the Minton study show a correlation between a variety of dance activities and some creative thinking skills, but we need to demonstrate transferability as well as correlation in order to demonstrate the full value of dance activities. Studies that also test for skill development of creative thinking skills in writing and other creative problem-solving disciplines would be useful, especially if such studies demonstrate either that dance allows for deeper and more pervasive learning or that some dance activities are more transferable than others.—K.B.

"This study suggests a possible relationship between dancing and improved ability to consider multiple perspectives."

METHODS

In 1998–1999, a Basic Reading through Dance (BRD) program was implemented in three Chicago public elementary schools. The goal of the program was to improve first-graders' reading ability through dance. The program lasted over 20 sessions. Each session was led by three dance specialists. The heart of each session consisted of teaching students to physically represent sounds by making shapes with their bodies to represent letters and letter combinations. Nine schools served as control schools. All 12 schools served predominantly African-American poverty-level children. A total of 174 BRD children and 198 control children were pre-and post-tested in reading using the Read America's Phono-Graphix Test. The test assesses the ability to recognize sounds for letters as well as phoneme segmentation ability. The study compared gain scores in the BRD and control children over three months.—E.W.

RESULTS

While both groups improved significantly in reading, those in the BRD group improved significantly more than those in the control group on all measures assessed by the reading test. They improved more in their ability to relate written consonants and vowels to their sounds, and to segment phonemes from spoken words, including nonsense words, compared to the control children.—E.W.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This is a well-designed study that shows that a three-month program in which children learn to physically represent letters with their bodies works to improve basic reading skills in these children.—E.W.

COMMENTARY

This study offers an innovative way to teach basic reading skills to at-risk children. Future research should examine whether the same kind of methods can help children improve in higher-level reading skills beyond basic decoding. It is important to recognize that the activities that helped children to learn to read were ones closely tied to reading: putting one's body in the shape of letters. This study does not allow the conclusion that dance leads to reading, but rather that putting one's body in the shape of letters improves basic reading skills in young children. Whether or not this activity is "dance" (a matter dancers could debate), we can conclude that this activity is an innovative and enactive way of helping children master sound-symbol relationships.—E.W.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

The method used in this study can be easily replicated for different age groups and more advanced skills—and should be. The study is rigorous in design, and the results have validity. Clearly, it demonstrates that movement can reinforce cognitive skill development—in this case, early reading skills. With a sample size of 174 in the experimental group and 198 in the control group, the evaluators have done a great service by demonstrating that quality research can be done easily and with direct application to the actual classroom.

The results should be disseminated widely.—K.B.

COMMENTARY

One of the most compelling aspects of the study is the use of improvisational movement exploration to discover how sounds can combine into words. The development of linguistic abilities mirrors the development of dance phrase making. Therefore, the study reveals that, more than merely reinforcing letter-shape recognition, dance can help children discover the "music" of language. Both auditory and visual stimuli were used to cue the kinesthetic. Students learned the shape of letters as well as the sounds of letters and were able to blend both sounds and letters into meaningful words. The use of a divergent approach, where children have a choice of multiple correct solutions, as opposed to the convergent approach such as a simple imitation of shape, is an example of the kind of active learning that will improve young children's skills. In the study, the experimental group scored lower on the pre-test, and therefore came further along using dance movement as the modality for reading skills.—K.B.

METHODS

Sixty 13-to 17-year-old at-risk and incarcerated adolescents participated in 45-minute jazz and hip-hop dance classes twice weekly for 10 weeks. Eleven college students, all with dance experience but only one dance major, engaged in participant/observation research. They observed, danced, and interviewed the teens and produced a "collective meta-portrait" (one student's contributed portrait is an appendix). The principal researcher gathered data weekly from three sources produced by student researchers: reflection joumals, in-class discussions, and written syntheses building toward students' final portrait. The principal researcher summarized and gave examples from these data sources but did not produce a portrait of the college students. Thus the relationship between the data and conclusions are not unequivocally dear.—L.H.

RESULTS

The first study produced hypotheses about why dance may be a medium particularly well suited to fostering positive self-perception and social development for disenfranchised adolescents. Hypotheses include the influence of teachers and teaching styles generally employed in dance (charismatic, physically powerful instructors, individualized instruction); the synergy of certain dance forms (jazz, hip-hop) with culturally valued leisure activities; the release of physical and psychological stress in which "expression, not conquest" is the activity's goal (in contrast to team sports); the focus of instruction on practicing non-linguistic bodily expression, which is a primary vehicle through which maladaptive social behaviors are conveyed; and the need and opportunity in dance to express individuality within a group, which provides practice with issues central to developing positive social identity and adaptability.

The second study suggests that the congruence of dance, service (providing data to prison administration about the dance program's effectiveness), and research (which placed college dance students in a social/therapeutic context and required reflection about impact and uses of the discipline) is an effective tool for advancing college students' understanding about how dance can be used and how reflection necessary in the method of portraiture fosters learning.—L.H.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study used a qualitative methodology (portraiture) to explore a provocative and under-researched relationship between arts (dance) and social and community service. Its goal was to generate a conceptual framework and potentially testable hypotheses for future research.

The study found that incarcerated and low-income, non-English-proficient middle school students reported gains in confidence, tolerance, and persistence related to dance instruction. It resulted in hypotheses that may explain why dance is particularly well suited to promoting such gains.

The study also found that college student researchers reported an expanded view of dance as a tool for fostering social values instead of serving solely as a medium for performance or as recreation.—L.H.

COMMENTARY

The study focuses on non-traditional outcomes of dance instruction. It posits artiste as social activists and positions dance as a tool for social interventions, in this case, for at-risk and incarcerated adolescents. Its two-level structure models a way that college teachers might expand their students' views of the purposes of their disciplines to include potential social impact.

Future research should investigate the hypotheses generated by this study about dance as an intervention for juvenile offenders and other disenfranchised adolescents. Such research could be qualitative or quantitative. Studies might compare the social effects of team sports with jazz and hip-hop dance instruction, or of different styles of dance instruction, with each treatment analyzed along the dimensions hypothesized by this study. The group-research model could be extended to groups of teachers in action-research projects.—L.H.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

Three major contributions to the field arise from this study:

(1) The methodology used (portraiture of the incarcerated students by the student-researchers from self-reflective journaling, contextualized and framed observations, interviews and presentations with feedback from the other student researchers) is brilliant, rich, and allows the process of learning to be revealed in its multifaceted components.

(2) The secondary level of the study (the self-reflective journaling by the student researchers) reveals a tool for expanding students' understanding of the value and range of the field of dance beyond technical proficiency and performance. Student researchers began to understand how dance could be a tool for progressive social and psychosocial growth.

(3) The conclusions by the author are profound and clearly make the case for why dance works so well with disadvantaged youth. Because she (Ross) had so much rich information to draw from, there are several stunning insights, including her statement, "Patience, and sometimes even compassion, can be social by-products of aesthetic engagement, and new regard for the human body (is what) dance can introduce."—K.B.

COMMENTARY

Ross has defined the best approach this writer has come across to understanding and unpacking what happens in a dance class. By using self-reflective observations, journaling, rich discussion, interviews, and a consensus-building approach to drawing conclusions, the author fosters understanding of both the value of and the constraints on dance informed learning. The study is a model for dance education researchers. Field observation requires a selection of stances, which, if their techniques embrace elements from the value system of the event or culture being studied, can truly portray the breadth and details of the event.

While the longitudinal value of dance classes for incarcerated youth may be difficult to deduce, requiring large expenditures of energy and time, the fact that several of the student researchers are continuing their involvement with the arts and underserved populations means there will be a small cadre of "anthropologists" who can continue to observe, reflect, critique, suggest, and develop projects such as this one in the future.

For the future, dance education researchers need to look at other forms of dance (in this case, jazz and hip-hop were the delivery system for dance technique) and to other dance experiences such as choreography, improvisation, and performing.—K.B.

METHODS

Participants were healthy, English speaking, right-handed females with normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Thirteen were novice dancers (9- to 12-year-olds with two years or less of ballet training), 12 young non-athletes (9- to 12-year-olds with no history of routine athletic training), 16 professional-level dancers (aged 18 to 25 with at least 10 years of routine ballet training), and 16 adult non-athletes (aged 18 to 25 with no history of routine athletic training). All subjects were recruited by posters and did not know the purpose of the study. Dancers and non-dancers in each age group were matched on socio-economic status.

Subjects completed Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (as an index of general intelligence) and four experimental tasks: (1) decisions about biomechanical constraints (e.g., "If your right palm is put on your right knee, your thumb is on the left side of your knee.") and mental rotation of (2) hands, (3) feet, and (4) cube figures.—L.H.

RESULTS

Young dancers made significantly fewer errors on the biomechanical constraints tasks than their age-mate non-athletes. No other comparisons were significantly different statistically (p = .05), although the trend was that dancers performed the biomechanical tasks and tasks requiring rotation of hands and feet faster and more accurately than non-athletes. Interestingly, the opposite (though still non-significant) trend occurred with mental rotation of objects (cube figures): non-dancers tended to perform these tasks faster and more accurately than dancers. Because these tasks may index two different skills (kinesthetic versus visual-spatial intelligence), and because the standard intelligence test (Raven's) did not predict performance level on the imagery tasks, the results support the idea of discrete and specialized cognitive abilities (multiple intelligence theory).—L.H.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study demonstrates the complexity of questions about transfer from arts (e.g., dance) to non-arts domains (e.g., mental rotation).

The study found no statistically significant differences between dancers and non-athletes on motor imagery ability. In addition, professional-level dancers were not significantly better at motor imagery than novice dancers. However, the effect sizes were positive and of moderate size. However, a considerably larger sample would be required to achieve statistical significance.—L.H.

COMMENTARY

COMMENTARY

This was a rigorous, initial study of a complex and understudied research domain—the effect of dance training on the ability to mentally rotate objects and/or pictures of body parts (hands and feet).

The author suggests that (1) future research should use larger samples,(2) longitudinal experimental, rather than correlational, designs would control variation in subject characteristics that may obscure any experimental effect, (3) experimental tasks should be redesigned to look more realistic (i.e., color photographs or videos of feet and hands), and (4) task difficulty should be made equivalent for tasks using objects or body parts.

Finally, the author suggests reframing the research questions as "Does motor imagery ability generalize from one domain to another?" or "Can motor imagery ability be improved with athletic or cognitive training?"—L.H.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

Since the entire area of kinesthetic intelligence is under-explored, especially in terms of the relationship of kinesthetic intelligence to cognition, this impressive study by an undergraduate initiates a dialogue that should continue. The author begins with an excellent discussion of motor planning and practice and the role of imagery in the development of kinesthesia. She includes interviews with elite athletes discussing how imagery makes a significant difference, subjectively, in performance. Since she uses ballet dancers as her subjects for the elite athlete group, the study makes the case for expanding research in the area of kinesthetic intelligence to include dancers. Ultimately, when and if the case is made for the role of kinesthetic intelligence in developing the "whole child," how dance facilitates the process should be included.—K.B.

COMMENTARY

The author, in her discussion, divides the tasks (there were four) into two categories: egocentric motor imagery (tasks one-three, which involved translating written and visual depictions of body-part relationships to the core of the body) and visual-spatial imagery tasks (task four, which involved a paired depiction of a series of cubes in various states of rotation). There was no real significant difference among the experimental groups; athletes did not do better than non-athletes. The author has several wonderfully reflective insights into why the results were not differentiated, but misses the most obvious: that the athletes were performing these tasks at a computer and were disengaged from their kinesthesis while performing the tasks It would be a worthy study to replicate everything about the study but allow the groups to move before responding. Therefore, the time on task may vary somewhat (and speed was a variable measured for this study), but results may be more accurate. Ballet dancers learn visually, with some auditory coaching for phrasing and musicality, but they also learn by "marking" the movement—doing a kind of scaled-down-and-back version of the patterns in their hands and legs.

In addition, modern dancers, particularly modern dancers who have had exposure to Laban Movement Analysis or Laban notation, or who have studied Laban-based dance techniques, would make an intriguing subject group for such kinesthetic tasks. Laban's approach to movement develops body-part awareness and spatial acuity directly, and such analytic skills may test differently from elite ballet dancers who, the author points out, are highly specialized and "domain-specific," Since Laban's theories of movement permeate elementary-level creative movement curricula in the United States and Canada, such a population may provide more useful data for understanding the role that kinesthetic intelligence plays in overall cognitive abilities.—K.B.

Essay:

Informing and Reforming Dance Education Research

Karen Kohn Bradley

The purpose of research in education is to improve the learning environment, learning processes, and teaching practices in schools and classrooms. As examples of how dance might help in these areas, the dance studies collected in this Compendium offer important initial insights into the best practices in the field and their effects. Educational researchers will find these studies a useful step on the longer journey to developing more, better, and more useful research on dance education. These studies also demonstrate the need for a common language to describe and analyze dance and its effects.

Dance Education and Transfer to General Learning

The seven studies in this Compendium suggest what directions dance researchers should pursue. They also provide important positive indications of exactly what young people learn in dance that relates to skills and attitudes applicable in other academic settings. Implications for curriculum and instruction are apparent as well.

The most consistent indication across the seven studies is the finding that dance is effective as a means of developing three aspects of creative thinking; fluency, originality, and abstractness. Mentzer & Boswell, Minton, and Kim all had positive correlations with at least one of these three areas of creative thinking. The results suggest that at the least, physical activities specific to dance support development of fluency by actively engaging students. This is not surprising when one considers that fluency of thinking is essentially a facility and mobility of mind and involves the ability of the student to turn ideas around and look at them from different angles. In dance, the body does the same thing and reflection on that process is a valuable aspect of dance-making. Originality and abstractness, likewise, are valued modes of dance education, especially where improvisation and composition are taught.

The studies thus suggest that dance instruction may provide a means for developing a range of the creative thinking aspects of critical thinking skills. More study of programs where creative thinking is valued by the school and assessed in regular classroom settings will reveal further insights into how dance activities support such development.

The studies by Ross and Mentzer & Boswell also provide indications of how students engaged in dance develop and are able to express new insights and interpretations. The two studies probe how moving, and reflecting on that movement through writing and drawing, can lead to shifts in how students view dance experiences and how students view themselves through dance experiences. Both studies are qualitative analyses. Nevertheless, the new insights are observable as behavioral changes and offer a rich direction for future research.

Ross's study demonstrated the process of journaling as a means of tracking changes in attitude of college dance students toward dance education. Her findings showed that journaling and rich discussion can broaden and deepen students' understanding of, and attitude toward, dance as a means of social change. The college students observed and reflected upon a dance program held in a juvenile prison facility. Mentzer & Boswell's study demonstrated the effects of a creative movement program on the writing and drawing of two learning-disabled boys. Specifically, one wonders whether the general effects of dance itself, the process of moving, the thinking/reflection upon moving, or the writing/drawing/dance-making products are ail equally necessary in order to effect the kind of rich shifts in perception these two studies suggest. Dance, as is suggested about other art forms in the essays in this Compendium, is in need of research that explains the interrelation of its specific dimensions as an arts experience and cognitive processes.

The Rose study is a quantitative study that provides a deep and rigorous look at a dance program that strives to use dance to improve the reading skills of students in three Chicago public elementary schools. The findings showed that the experimental group of first-graders improved significantly in the three areas of reading skills measured: consonant sounds, vowel sounds, and phoneme segmentation abilities. As difficult as empirical studies can be to carry out on a public school population and across two disciplines (dance and reading, in this case), Rose has established groundwork for additional studies in this area and has provided a basic approach to experiments that reveal a great deal about how a typical dance program can affect cognitive development.

Proving causality between variables is difficult enough when those variables are confined to a sterile environment in a Petri dish. While we desire predictability in education, children are complex and slippery learners. In education research, we are trying to understand the underlying processes of learning. Our goal is not replicability in the laboratory but improvement in the classroom, a different kind of replicability. Rose's larger sample size (174 in the experimental group and 198 in the control group), timely pre- and post-testing, and rigorous analysis of test scores provide an integrity of process that makes the impressive positive outcomes (the experimental group started out lower in reading skills and finished higher) exciting and provocative.

Rose, Mentzer & Boswell, and Ross provide important guidance on the future of dance education research and instruction. All three studies view dance experiences as more than simply learning to dance or learning about dance. Dance is defined as a full and powerful modality for interacting with the world of ideas. In addition, in these studies, teacher's goals for the students were overt, supplying clear directions for student learning and facilitating transference. While such practices may not provide the sterility of context that is required by some research methods, they are part of good teaching and can lead to a fuller understanding of how real children learn in real schools.

Most of the studies included are instructive in their procedural assumptions but do not clearly define the specific dance activity under study. Future research needs to delineate what the dance variable is (technique, improvisation, performance, or choreography), what the intended outcomes of that specific dance experience are (improved critical thinking skills, increased fluency or abstractness of thinking, better technique, more original choreography, etc.), and how the movements are assessed in relation to the intended outcomes. The impact of such informed, specific, and rich data on classroom practice and student learning would be powerful.

The Need for a Common Language

In order for dance teachers to improve and disseminate their best methods and content, even more research and reflection on effective classroom practice are needed. Both quantitative and qualitative studies should incorporate dance theory as a way of noting and analyzing instructional content and practice and student learning. Dance theory will fill an important gap visible in this collection of studies, the lack of a common language by which to discuss dance and the changes that take place during the course of learning dance.

The use of a common language from dance theory is critical to the future rigor and robustness of dance research, whether it is empirical or descriptive. Getting at the details of movement change, describing shifts in attitude and expression, facilitating the expansion of movement vocabulary, and accurate measurement of such growth are the essence of a sound and useful body of research. The grammar of movement is inherent in dance style and technique, and various methods of analysis have been developed, one of which is Laban Movement Analysis (LMA). LMA is a system of movement analysis that has been used to document elements of movement change in athletes, actors, politicians, and in various cultures, as well as with dancers.

In several of the studies, noting or eliciting specific components of the movement might have allowed for more detailed analysis of the learning. The potential of the level of detail LMA provides could be demonstrated in studies (e.g., Rose) where children made letter shapes with their bodies and moved to the sounds of letters in order to develop early reading skills. By providing language that orients children in space, allows them to articulate (nonverbally) specific configurations of pathway and line, delineates qualities of movement and sound, and relates parts to wholes, LMA could provide data not only on whether the children learned their letters and could form words from them but also on the individual approach each child took. Learning styles and the preferred modalities of each child can be noted through the movement observation.

In addition to delineating specific approaches to learning and providing a means for perceiving the details of change, users of LMA adopt a particular stance toward analysis of the movement components of an event. The trained observer notes no more than what has changed in the mover's configurations. Therefore, the analysis and subsequent interpretation of the data reveal what the mover does, not what he/she does not do. LMA provides a map of the individual child's learning style as well as a way of documenting the evolving content of the child's learning.

The case study of Mentzer & Boswell, in which two boys were studied for creative thin king growth via creative movement experiences, could be enriched by observation of specific movement changes, in addition to the study's analysis of the poetry they wrote and drawings they made. Skotko could have observed the movement changes both the "dancers" and "non-athletes" she studied went through to organize for the motor planning tasks she analyzed. Dale Rose could have recorded the specific aspects of movement that best reinforce language acquisition and early reading skills. And Ross' college students could have written more descriptively and critically about the dance classes they were observing, providing more informed and richer data to track attitude changes.

Aligning Curriculum and Instruction in Dance with Research: Implications for Future Research

Beyond the need for a common language to discuss the changes that take place through dance, and more and better research, the dance studies in this Compendium illustrate a need for dance curricula in public schools to reflect current research so that educators and researchers can conduct informative assessments. In order for research to be useful and applicable to real classrooms, teachers and researchers need to share the common goal of reflecting on practice with integrity and insight. Teachers need to know various processes of inquiry and terms of discourse in the field of dance and need to field-test approaches to capturing specific information about how well students are utilizing dance for cognitive development. Researchers need to know the breadth and depth of dance content and open up to the methods of observation embraced within the discipline itself.

The research also suggests that for transfer of cognitive development from dance to other areas of learning and application to be more powerful, teachers should explicitly support transference so that it is more strongly incorporated into meta-cognitive activities, especially activities such as mapping and other such theoretical constructions. Lots of rich evaluative and reflective activities—writing, drawing, discussion, applied projects, product-making within the field (dance-making, performance building) and thoughtful, not rote, practice—are also indicated as productive reinforcements.

Conclusions

Clearly defined, discipline-embedded studies in dance need to be encouraged, supported, and disseminated. With good statistics and in-depth studies of the specifics of particular processes, educators will be able to replicate, amend, and develop the best practices dance education can offer. Educators, parents, and administrators will learn just how potent and effective dance can be with children, intrinsically and instrumentally. And finally, educators can design rich, effective dance experiences with the needs of real children in mind.

METHODS

Existing research pointed to two developments important to the success of children with learning disabilities. One was the centrality of linguistic skills, variations in which account for most placements of children into special-needs status. The second was consensus in research that children with learning disabilities typically lack social skills necessary for effective peer-to-peer and student-teacher interactions—relations that contribute generally to success in school. While the use of drama to promote linguistic and social development in special education had a history of scholarly advocacy, no one had put the idea to a concrete test.

The study was developed with the assistance of 70 special and regular education teachers who helped define the most important and problematic social skills for children with learning disabilities. What essentially amounted to a factor analysis identified four clusters of behaviors and skills as critical for success in the classroom: (1) courtesy to others—apologizing when actions have injured or infringed on another, (2) self-control—finding acceptable ways of using free time when work is completed, (3) focus—ignoring distractions from peers when doing classroom work, and (4) social compliance—following written directions.

Thirty-five students with learning disabilities were selected from two urban schools with speech canters. They ranged in age from 5 to 11 and had diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. There were 21 students in the experimental group and 14 in the control group, apparently divided by school. The main design was a pre- and post-test model with two groups.

The treatment group engaged in 12 weekly 40-minute creative drama activities, three of the 12 sessions aimed at each of the four skill clusters. Separate drama programs with common goals were designed and run in parallel for the students with learning disabilities receiving primary-and intermediate-level instruction respectively. The dramatic activities were designed with the four critical social skill clusters in mind—e.g., one three-week segment emphasized mutual courtesy and recognizing when one's actions hurt another child. The dramatic action in this segment reinforced apologizing.

Comparison-group children received their normal routine of weekly language therapy.

Student language skills were assessed before and after the intervention using the Test of Language Development (TOLD). The Walker-McConnell Scale of Social Competence was used to gauge social skills, along with the Test of Specific Oral and Language and School Adjustment Skills (SLS). Scales within these social skills assessments were matched to the four primary social behavior clusters outlined above. Post-test measures were taken in the two weeks following the program and also eight weeks later to test for sustained effects. In addition to pre- and post-test measures, interviews probed the experiences and conclusions of student in the drama group.—J.C

RESULTS

The researchers used analyses of variance for testing group differences on various post-test measures and pre- to post-test gains. The children who participated in the creative drama program increased their social skills in all four clusters of social behaviors more than students in the control group. They also significantly improved in their oral expressive language skills when compared with the control group. Receptive language skills (acts of interpreting oral speech of others) were not comparatively affected by the drama program. While these results provide indicators of the helpful effects of dramatic activities on the social and language skills of students with learning disabilities, the follow-up test might be considered to be the most critical element of the research design. In comparison to so many studies that halt operation at the post-assessment this study tests for sustained effects two months later. All post-measures of language and social skills for the drama group held up over time.

When asked about what they learned in the experiment, children most frequently mentioned aspects of courtesy and general peer-to-peer relations—getting along with their classmates. Students also reported that the drama lessons helped them listen and speak better.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

The main contribution of this study is that it is the first reported sizable experimental test of creative drama concerning academic and social development of children with learning disabilities. Historically, research studies focusing on children with learning disabilities used linguistic deficits as the main distinguishing characteristic of children in this group. In addition, numerous studies agree, according to the authors, that students with learning disabilities need adaptive social skills to interact with others more effectively, to be accepted by their peers, and to work effectively within heterogeneous, mainstreamed school classrooms.

This experiment contributes relatively "hard" quantitative evidence that both linguistic and social skills increased through a program of creative drama.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

The importance of this study, and of research generally that relates learning in the arts to developments of special-needs populations, is underscored by the fact that about eight percent of all elementary and secondary education students are enrolled in special education programs. Among these children, a majority has designated learning disabilities (2.2 million out of 4.3 million special education students).

The research enlisted 70 regular and special education teachers to help identify important and difficult social skill needs of students with learning disabilities, which grounded the main questions and instruments used in this study. The study used experimental and control groups assessed with standard, scaled tests of social and language development; the work also enlisted systematic interviews to gauge the meanings and conclusions that subjects drew from the experiment.

The study includes detailed appendices describing the various dramatic activities and the inclusion of supplemental interviews. These appendices are helpful windows into this study.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study makes a unique contribution in its focus on the effect of drama on the expressive and receptive oral-language abilities of students with learning disabilities. It is appropriately grounded in the rich body of claims and research on the effects of drama as a stimulus for growth in the development of oral language for all students, not just those with learning disabilities.

De la Cruz went to great lengths to compare the views of special education and of general education teachers in terms of the social skills they considered both important and difficult for students with learning disabilities, and focused on only those skills that both groups of teachers agreed on. Thus, her findings pertain to the interest of both groups of teachers.—B.J.W.

COMMENTARY

De la Cruz's finding that drama training can improve the social skills of students with learning disabilities is a significant finding for a society concerned about the escalation of violence in schools and the need to balance pressures for accountability with realistic and effective approaches to the social development of students.

An interesting aspect of this study, though not its main purpose, is the comparison between the social skills special education and regular teachers consider important and difficult. An ethnographic study of the ways these two groups of teachers view their students who have learning disabilities, and the ways they relate to them in facilitating the improvement of their social skills, might be revealing. The more teachers understand the challenges of students with learning disabilities and know effective ways to facilitate social and language development the better.—B.J.W.

METHODS

The study looked at three groups of fifth-grade students in remedial reading classes that demonstrated comparable skill levels in both the California Achievement Test and the Reading Diagnostic section of the Metropolitan Achievement Test (MAT6). Each group had 17 students. Groups One and Two received a structured remedial reading program for six weeks using six selected children's stories. Group One used creative drama to support story comprehension. Croup Two used "traditional," non-remedial methods to support story comprehension—they read the same stories as Group One, followed by vocabulary exercises and teacher-led discussions. Group Three was the control group and continued the ongoing remedial program.

Group One was taught by the researcher, Groups Two and Three were taught by their regular teachers. The study acknowledges the challenge of having the researcher provide the creative drama intervention. The researcher worked closely with the other two teachers to ensure that the teachers used similar and detailed lesson plans and common learning outcomes. This helped to validate inferences about observed instructional outcomes.

The study used the MAT6 for pre- and post-study assessments of reading comprehension. Groups One and Two also used a weekly criterion-referenced test (CRT] to assess story comprehension, since these two groups focused on children's literature as part of their instructional designs. (A CRT asks factual or inferential questions, which have right and wrong answers, and sometimes better and worse answers. Higher scores indicate higher comprehension of a story). A team of three reading teachers/specialists and the researcher designed the CRT linked to the stories used in this research; an independent panel also reviewed this test.—J.C.

RESULTS

The study finds that "…when children have been involved in the process of integrating creative drama with reading they are not only able to better comprehend what they've read and acted out, but they are also better able to comprehend what they have read but do not act out, such as the written scenarios they encounter on standardized tests." This is an important finding that warrants scrutiny and additional research—that drama not only contributes to the immediate subject of a dramatic enactment but also associates with comprehension of written stories unrelated to the drama activity. This is an instance of transfer of skills in one arena to skills useful more generally, albeit a closely related transfer. The observation suggests that some sort of disposition in a child's approach to reading may be influenced by the connection between dramatic enactment and reading. Comparisons across all three groups show that the group using creative drama achieved significantly higher scores on the CRT than the traditional group (Group Two); the creative drama group also outscored Groups Two and Three on the MAT6 reading achievement test. Analyses of variance show that Group One is the only group showing a significant increase from pre- to post-test scores. Group Two actually displays a significant decrease in the MAT6 test scores—perhaps because the test-retest protocol can turn children off to retests following too soon on the heels of a first test. Group Three also shows a decrease in mean scores from pre- to post-tests, but this decrease is not significant.

The research has some design limitations and interpretation puzzles linked to factors such as the use of intact classes rather than random assignment to groups, the rather small size of the respective groups studied (17 students in each), and the use of the researcher as a teacher. The study, however, is designed to minimize these impacts through careful pre-testing and coordination between the researcher and other participating teachers.

There remains the possibility that children in the researcher-led class using creative drama knew that something important was up and gave the post-test more effort than did the other two groups. This raises the possibility that an unknown combination of at least two conditions propelled the positive results—the positive impact of creative drama linked to reading, and the positive impact on motivation brought by a guest drama teacher bringing something new to reading lessons in the classroom,—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study finds that fifth-grade remedial reading students engaging in a six-week course of literature-based "creative drama" show significantly greater gains in story comprehension than students in a discussion-based program and a control student group. An important contribution of this work is that it involved fifth-graders, in comparison with a majority of literacy-related drama studies, which experiment with preschool or early-primary-grade children. Another contribution is that the entire study population suffered shortfalls of reading skills for their grade level and thus all were at high risk of subsequent difficulties across the school curriculum. Moreover, this study found skills gained through drams transferred to skills in comprehending literature not presented as part of the program, a claim that must be taken seriously and scrutinized carefully.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

DuPont uses the term "creative drama" to indicate the practice of reading non-illustrated story text, followed by children's invented (or created) scenes prepared for enactment, along with "oral and pantomimed" extensions of their stories. She anchors the label in a 1975 term defined by the Children's Theatre Association of America to mean "…an improvisational, non-exhibitional, process-centered form of drams…(where children)…imagine, enact, and reflect upon human experience."

This is a thoughtful study with results worth attending to. The author suggests that "…merely reading and discussing children's literature is not an effective means for enhancing reading comprehension as measured by standardized tests," at least for remedial readers. This is a strong claim, since reading and discussing are the bread and butter of traditional reading instruction at the upper-elementary-school level. An extension of the main work within this study leads to suggestions that creative drama can improve children's attitudes toward reading by associating reading with a fun activity; such engagement, as theory should hold, encourages more reading and may also enhance mental imagery of written material. Such imaging skills and dispositions have been found to associate with comprehension of written text.

The study's findings suggest areas where additional research might pay off, including extending the study to students with higher levels of reading skills and assessing the effectiveness of creative drama in substantive content areas such as social studies and science. That is, research could test the idea that one can learn more science (or about a particular theme or unit within a science course) through creative drama than through other modes of instruction.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This research was carefully planned and executed, with every attempt made to make the three groups of studied children (each group involved two classes of eight to nine remedial reading students) as comparable as possible. In addition, instructional strategies during the specified reading lessons were strictly adhered to. This lends more credence to the finding that integrating creative drama with children's literature produces better reading comprehension than just using the same literature without creative drama or basic skills instruction.

The study also calls attention to the intriguing, yet untested possibility that creative drama assists students in developing "mental images" of stories, which in turn helps with comprehension.—B.W.

COMMENTARY

The research, while illustrating the power of combining drama with literature as a reading technique, still suffers from the fact that the researcher was the teacher of that experimental condition. While there were steps taken to ensure fidelity of instruction during the specified reading lessons, what remains unresolved without qualitative research is the influence of differential instruction during the rest of the school day. We know nothing about who the teachers were during the remainder of the day or their pedagogical style. Students don't learn comprehension skills just during reading class. How much of an impact did that other instruction have on students' reading comprehension?

The research points to some important and interesting unresolved questions. First, it remains unknown why students with creative drama instruction performed better, both on the criterion test and on transferability to a standardized test of comprehension. Second, the author asks whether the power of dramatic acting as a tool for comprehension might be used in other areas of learning such as mathematics or science. And, finally, are most poor readers indined toward kinesthetic-tactile learning styles? What implications might that have for teachers in carefully assessing students' learning styles and in tailoring instruction that ensures an optimal match between learning styles and instructional practices?—B.W.

METHODS

This study addresses the potential roles of imaginative play (or creative role-playing) on two foundational cognitive abilities of children— referred to as "conservation" and "perspectivism," Conservation refers to an individual's understanding that attributes of persons or objects in their environment may remain constant when these persons or things take on additional attributes: a father who becomes a doctor would still be a father. Two types of "perspectivism" are also examined. "Physical perspectivism" refers to an understanding that the physical arrangement of the environment remains the same even though one moves among different vantage points. "Social perspectivism" refers to an ability to sustain understanding of kinship relations or social relations within a group: is this father also a brother, and how would you justify this? The kindergartners examined in this work were relatively weak in both conservation and perspectivism at the start of the study.

The study involved 36 kindergarten children randomly assigned to one of three groups: (1) adult-structured group training in imaginative play processes,(2) free-play activity in the non-directive presence of the experimenter, and (3) a control group. Each child was observed before, during, and after the experiment by each of five trained observers.

For the experiment, one group was assigned to a training condition in which groups of four children met twice weekly for four weeks of coached imaginative play. The investigator introduced a theme, encouraged the children to create praps using materials provided, and initiated imaginative play. The second group was also divided into groups of four children who met with the investigator on the same schedule as the training group. Their intervention consisted of a free-play period with no structured training. The control group continued regular kindergarten activities. After one month, all children in the three groups were again tested for conservation and perspectivism.—J.C.

RESULTS

The pre and post observation-of-play results provide evidence that higher levels of imaginative play can be taught to young children through teacher-initiated activities and modeling. Moreover, these behaviors are retained after the completion of the training. The study found that "…the children in the (imaginative play) training group demonstrated s significant improvement in play imaginativeness during the post-training observation."

The training in imaginative play was also linked to developmental gains associated with social roles. While all three groups improved on conservation and perspective-taking tasks over time, the training group, coached in imaginative play, consistently improved on both measures more than the two comparison groups.

These results suggest that coached imaginative play contributes to important social developments of children. As Piaget described, the passage of children between very young ages—"pre-operational (2 to 3 years) to a more mature period (7 to 8 years)—is marked by significant differences in the wary children understand the world around them. At the pre-operational stage, the child "assimilates" events and conditions around him or her, making events, people and places fit his or her preconceived views of the world. This egocentric stance gradually gives way to a more accommodating stance by the child toward his/her own environment—one in which the child shows evidence of a more generative and plastic take on the world. This is a stage in which the child begins to understand the world around him both in his or her own terms, as before, but also in the terms of the other players on the stage. It is in this transition that children grow in their skills at conservation—o' social roles particularly in the case of imaginative play, and in perspectivism—a set of skills permitting accurate and consistent comprehension of social situations through different vantage points.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This early (1976) study differs from others in the Compendium mainly because it examines very specific cognitive functioning impacted by imaginative play, rather than more holistic skills such as reading comprehension or story sequence recall, which are assessed in many drama/academic skills studies. The author finds that kindergartners who engage in imaginative play training sessions show significant improvement in two important Piagetian developmental measures—conservation and perspectivism. Conservation and perspectivism are critical building blocks allowing children to make physical and social sense of the world around them.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

The study provides evidence that given appropriate modeling and resources, the imaginative play of young children can result in important developmental gains in contrast to play under a mock training experience (meeting with the investigator who merely supervised free play) or in the typical routines of the kindergarten classroom. This study offers useful guidance for classroom activities, and supports the existing research on the ability of imaginative or dramatic play to enhance psychological and intellectual development.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study highlights the importance of imaginative play in a young child's cognitive development. In particular, the study calls for a modification of Piaget's theory, which suggests that imaginative play experiences do not aid in cognitive development. Instead, the research suggests that, contradictory to Piaget's assertions, imaginative play can help a child develop cognitive abilities,—C.G.-P.

COMMENTARY

This study suggests that more research is needed that pays attention to how a child's playtime is structured. This has implications for practice, in that it suggests that teachers can facilitate the development of imaginative play by suggesting possible themes and using appropriate props to support play.—C.G.-P.

METHODS

This study was carried out in a school serving a college campus. Subjects were children of college employees representing a wide range of income and education levels. The research was carried out in an intact preschool classroom with 17 children (one African-American, one Asian, 15 white; 12 girls, five boys; ranging between just under 5 to 6 years of age). The class used dramatic play on a nearly daily basis over five months. Ninety-seven play episodes were observed. Themes within dramatic play ranged from the very common (house, family, school, stories) to the occasional unique subject (farm, fishing, concert).

The researcher used traditional ethnographic methods to categorize themes of the children's drama and to explore the literacy activities of children during dramatic enactment. The researcher worked to minimize the intrusiveness of the research on classroom behavior by taking on a routine role of assistant teacher over the entire five months. Data collection included participant observation, informal interviews, and document analysis. As the study progressed, tape recording and videotaping were introduced to support analyses. The researcher focused on a variety of literacy-related phenomena: functional uses of literacy; the ability of children to translate familiar stories into play texts; use of play to establish physical setting and to present stories; the use of personal themes; and modes and degrees of social interaction.—J.C.

RESULTS

"Literacy" was the primary focus of this research—the use of reading skills, decoding written materials and drawing inferences, and translating narrative and sequence into dramatic text. The study finds that one common form of literacy served to organize children play—namely that children's favorite stories often become the basis for many play scripts. Children also used literacy skills in composing their play scripts. Both teacher/student and student/student interactions influenced children's choices about the importance and use of literacy within their plays. The settings of literary texts appeared in varying degrees in their dramatizations.

Through play, the children exhibit important facets of their literacy—their ability to read texts and materials (even artifacts) related to their play, their use of written artifacts within their play, and their efforts at composing scenes and plays. Within the "risk-free" atmosphere of dramatic play, children are also able to expand their use of literacy skills. The researcher notes a positive relationship between creating stories and translating stories into play texts. Such translation includes establishing settings, characters, character relationships, and plots.

In the words of the study's author "This study supports the use of dramatic play in literacy learning in that children are frequently using literacy on their own as well as with teacher direction. "The use of literacy by children in drama suggests a significant "opportunity benefit," namely supplanting non-learning, self-directed time with the literacy-rich activities of drama.

The dramatic play examined in this study also exposed an aspect of literacy internal to dramatic enactment apparently important for the motivation of children to gain literacy skills. Literacy objects were perceived as giving power to the possessor (the child with the map was allowed to direct play). Moreover, literacy in the form of detailed understanding of texts appeared to give power to playwrights. And the ability to direct play also reflects the children's "storying" skills and appears to elevate their social status within the classroom.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

The main contribution of this study to the body of research on drama and learning is its singular focus on the use of reading, writing, and written artifacts within the dramatic activities of pre-kindergartners. Literacy refers to reading and writing skills. Literacy is used in drama when children decode texts or scripts for enactment, use written or symbolic documents (such as a ticket or a map} within a play, or when they write scripts. We include a number of studies of reading comprehension and story understanding linked to dramatic enactment in this Compendium, but only in this study do we see an inquiry into the effects of using reading, writing, and written objects within dramatic activities. What results is a refined portrait of critical cognitive developments occurring through drama. The researcher finds that "dramatic play is a vehicle whereby children can both practice and learn about literacy skills and begin to develop 'storying' skills which might be used in story writing."—J.C.

COMMENTARY

This study provides a thoughtful analysis of how dramatic play among pre-kindergartners fosters the development of literacy skills and how the specific use of literacy activities and arti-facts within dramatic play can reinforce reading and writing development. Because 5-year-olds are at fairly early stages of "literacy" development, dramatic play may be all the more important for these children if the dramatic form provides a motivating context for learning about literacy, using literacy skills, and exploring new and abstract concepts. In the findings of this study, drama provides that context.

The relationship between creating play texts and writing abilities was not addressed in this study, but would be a good candidate for extended work with this sort of program—specially for somewhat more mature readers and writers such as fourth- and fifth-graders.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This qualitative investigation makes a distinct contribution from most of the other studies in this Compendium in that data were collected in a naturalistic setting (a regular kindergarten classroom) over an extended period of time (five months). Furthermore, the purpose was not to test a pre-determined hypothesis to explore the effect of arts on student learning. Rather, the research describes the relationship between dramatic play and literacy and then goes on to explore some of the critical factors that influence that relationship by using richly textured qualitative data.

The research provides powerful evidence that dramatic play is an important vehicle whereby children can both practice and learn about literacy skills and knowledge.—B.W.

COMMENTARY

The biggest shortcoming of this type of research is the lack of generalizability to other settings. To what degree are the findings only applicable to the Caucasian, middle-class students in the study? In addition, the sample included a preponderance of females (12 females and five males). While some examples were offered from the boys, most of them were from the girls. Might the relationships look different in a predominantly male or balanced-gender context? The richness of findings from the detailed observations however, generally outweighs concerns such as these.

The research highlights three messages that transcend age and content. That is, the findings apply not only to young learners but also older ones and not only to literacy but also other aspects of learning. These have important implications for classroom practice. First, the physical setting in which learning takes place is critical; it is important to have it be both rich and ever changing if learning is to be maximized. Second, the learning environment needs to take advantage of students' personal interests. To de-contextualize learning from what students know and understand restricts the learning potential. And, finally, learning is highly relational. Quality learning requires extensive opportunity for student-student and teacher-student interaction.—B.W.

METHODS

This study took place over a school year in the "theater institute" at a New York City high school—a magnet school within the school. While there is an audition process for admission to the school, all students who express a genuine interest are accepted. The teacher/researcher (T/R) conducted the double-period, daily theater class for the seniors in the school. As part of their theater magnet school experience, the students had studied various aspects of theater an hour per day as 10^th- and 11^th-graders. Even with this background, the students entered the senior year theater class with common, doubting feelings: traditional theater was "not for people like us," "no one looks like us on stage," and "no one writes about the dreams and problems we share."

In the senior-year class, students were encouraged to write and perform an original play addressing something of relevance to themselves. The T/R coached ana facilitated the student work but did not tell the students what to write. She led the students through various activities designed to engender creativity (e.g., visual awareness), sense of ensemble (e.g., listening skills), and playwriting skills (e.g., character sketches). The T/R used a variety of strategies to document the class. Instruments included interviews, tape recordings of student discussions and scene rehearsals, observations of audience reactions, and reports of other teachers and the school principal. The T/R also administered pre- and post-questionnaires; the T/R and students maintained logs. The students ultimately chose to write and perform plays of their own, although as described below, the start-up phase proceeded with great hesitation.

Several students left the researcher's program during the course of the school year, mainly at the semester break when students are reviewed for overall progress in school. Thus the researcher obtained a full set of observations and other data for 29 students.—J.C.

RESULTS

The program established guidelines and training aimed at student playwriting, but the students began the program with little sense of just how to proceed. Initial, exploratory writing exercises showed that the students struggled even with what to write about, much less about how to conceive of an issue or interest area that might become a play. But the challenge (and the teacher) kept a spark of interest alive and students slowly became more pro-active. They looked less to the teacher and more to themselves for ideas and were more responsible for their ideas. They collaborated in discussions of each others evolving scripts. Attendance improved over the year. Students began using the school and local libraries regularly. And in contrast to the early weeks, when students could find nothing to write about, they ended up writing far more than they could address in their dramatic productions. All students who began the program did not get this far, but for the 29 who remained for the entire year, the impacts of the theater institute were unmistakable.

Students provide evidence of important growth in self-perception and behavior over the year. Students increasingly saw themselves as leaders and as important members of the class. Library registration increased from 25 percent to 85 percent of the class over the year; and the percentage of students agreeing that they knew how to put on a play went from 25 percent to 57 percent (In a theater magnet school program, this last development seems an important accomplishment; but it seems an excessive responsibility for a capstone course. What did these students learn about theater in grades 10 arc 11?)

The resulting story is one in which incipient halting, nonproductive struggles with a problem give way to sustained activities, informed through the use of multiple outside resources. This outcome evokes Bransford's notion of "unsequestered" problem-solving outlined in his recent review of research on the "transfer" of skills.' (See the essay on transfer in this Compendium). Unsequestered (freed-up) problem-solving refers to acts of stretching toward a quality product or performance through identifying and seeking out helpful resources and taking time to do so—as opposed to stopping at ready solutions and refusing to take risks of being wrong.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study makes more than one valuable contribution to the domains of theater/drama and academic and social development. First, it focuses on writing dramatic scripts and setting up productions by students—and not solely on dramatic story re-enactment and fantasy play, which dominate the literature. Second, the study's subjects are high school seniors—only a handful of Compendium drama studies involve students beyond the elementary school level. Third, this study focuses on collaborative creative processes in the making of dramatic art—the program became a laboratory for spontaneous and guided cooperative learning. And finally, this study uses a teacher/researcher model in which the teacher serves two hours per day, all year as the instructor for the students. Researcher engagements as teachers in other studies in the Compendium are typically low intensity, occasional, and active for no more than a few days or weeks.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

This is a year-long, non-experimental study. Although a variety of instruments are used and specific data collected, most of the data from interviews and questionnaires take a fairly minor supporting role in the conclusions drawn by the researcher. The most important findings of this study relate to the arc of the students' lives in this classroom over the school year. The portrayal comes as much from the researcher's sense of what went on and how things changed over the school year as it does from changes in student answers from pre- to post-program questionnaires.

This is a study of playwriting and performance. But clearly it is also a story of adult mentorship. Individual attention or connection can sometimes turn an indifferent academic career into a productive and positive experience. These students ultimately benefited from writing and enacting their plays; but a dogged coach interested in their welfare seemed to serve as a necessary catalyst.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study makes a significant contribution to understanding how the dramatic arts—coupled with a collaborative pedagogical approach focused on continual improvement—can improve student engagement in learning as well as higher-order thinking skills. The teacher/researcher in this case provides a comprehensive case example of how action research can be used to improve practice and motivate an ethnically diverse group of inner-city high school drama students.—C.G.-P.

COMMENTARY

In this study, dramatic writing is used as a curricular vehicle to assist students in developing critical thinking and collaboration skills. The study documents that it is not just dramatic writing but also the process through which students are taught that is important (e.g., dramatic writing requires critical thinking skills). The researcher-teacher used a collaborative/democratic approach to instruction requiring the class to write a play together; thus, they were dependent upon each other. With the current push for higher test scores nationally, this study points to the importance of valuing higher-order thinking skills.—C.G.-P

METHODS

This study involved 27 sophomores in a rural public high school in Pennsylvania. A workshop was implemented in an intact classroom with 22 academic, one business, and four vocational students (15 females and 12 males). The intervention consisted of 28 sessions over a six-week period led by the researcher—a relatively intense program in a domain where twice-weekly drama sessions or a few days of dramatic enactments are more the mode. The workshop was voluntary, but the entire class agreed to participate and no one withdrew.

In the first segment of the study, students were introduced to the basic form and conceptions of poetry and encouraged to write poems emphasizing personal feelings and thoughts. Once the poetry-writing segment was completed, the researcher provided oral presentation skills instruction and coached students toward oral interpretations of their poems. The final segment entailed rehearsals and presentations.

Data were gathered from seven sources: two assessments by the regular teacher (Pre-Workshop Student Assessments and Assessments of Final Presentations), four student self-reports and questionnaires (Profits Questionnaire. Initial Self-Report, Interim Reaction Report Final Questionnaire), and the researcher/instructor's log of Daily Observations and Interpretation. The questionnaires were designed to capture student behaviors and student learning from three different vantage points.—J.G

RESULTS

The study found that the workshop on the oral interpretation and dramatic presentation of personal poems improves oral skills, increases comfort with oral communication, and enhances self-esteem and self-image. The first two results seem straightforward—speaking before classmates overtime cultivates speaking skills and increases self-confidence. The likely causes of observed and reported advancements in self-esteem and self-image are open to alternative explanations presenting personal poems in a supportive environment might have such an effect; so might increased confidence in oral communication more generally. No date were collected on the students' willingness to engage in, or their effectiveness in speaking in, their other classes or in other settings—something the researcher might have done as part of the experiment or during the weeks and months after the program. The limitations of the study do not detract, however, from the apparent core effectiveness of this pedagogical design.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

One contribution of this study is the unique set of behaviors drawn into its lens. Kassab's experiment differs from others in the drama section of the Compendium in three ways. One is that it involves student-composed poetry at the core of the dramatic act, and not the commonly utilized stories by other authors or student-created fictional narratives. The second difference is that the emphasis is on the personal, self-reflective, nature of the "play"—or poetry enactment in this case. And the third difference is that the enactment balances the poetic composition with effective oral delivery as the essential dramatic art of the program. The study also contributes positive findings about the effects of drama on both academic and social development—namely, increased oral communication skills as well as increased self-confidence noted below.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

Improving oral communication skills and student comfort with oral communication has strong implications for classroom success. The use of reading poetry aloud to encourage and support oral communication is well established in the therapeutic community and holds relatively untested promise for school-based use. This study begins to examine this link.

The study's design is too limited to draw broad conclusions, but it does provide evidence that this approach brings benefits to students. This study makes a good case for the promise of further research into the effectiveness of poetic interpretation accompanied by oral presentation in supporting both academic and social growth. The study perhaps serves best as a first step in establishing a classroom program and a set of data collection protocols around which a more rigorous investigation could be designed. The study offers many areas where spillover benefits and/or transfer might be probed: these include whether there are any residual results from such an intervention over time, whether the types of writing undergirding dramatic enactment (e.g., poetry vs. expository prose) produce different results, and whether the skills gained in this type of program (or in other programs aimed at the same oral communication goals) impact academic achievement.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

The importance of this study centers on its suggestion that poetry writing and oral presentation can improve communication skills. Of equal importance is that the study's findings are dependent upon the particular pedagogical approach used by the instructor, namely that the workshops served as a supportive learning environment (free from criticism and judgment) for the students. The author suggests that a supportive learning environment coupled with a poetic/dramatic approach can improve a students oral expression. Thus, the study highlights one possible way of improving oral communication skills,—C.G.-P.

COMMENTARY

This study highlights the importance of examining the process by which the arts are taught to students. Studies often assume that adding art instruction will lead to improved student outcomes. What these conceptualizations miss is how the structure of the classroom environment can influence how the arts impact student learning. In this case the author of the study created an environment in which students worked in groups and their input and concerns were valued. So it is difficult to disentangle the impact of the use of poetry and drama from the noncompetitive and nonjudgmental learning environment created by the instructor/researcher. Additionally, the study also suggests that the lack of emphasis on public speaking in high schools leaves many students with weak oral communication skills.—C.G.-P.

METHODS

This was a reasonably large-scale study by the standards of research in educational psychology, involving 63 students. The students were randomly chosen from the second- and third-grade classes in a single school. The study was conducted in a rural area, predominantly populated by lower-middle-class Caucasians. The study took place over 15 weeks, mid-length among studies commonly seen.

Three groups were compared. One group focused on drawing activities, one group on drama activities, and the third served as a control group experiencing a traditional question-and-answer approach to developing narrative writing skills. The drama activities focused on individuals' ideas for stories. Students in the drama group used poetry, pantomime, games, movement, and improvisation to develop their narrative writing. Students in the drawing group used figure, action, and setting drawings to develop their narratives. A third group used no special intervention to promote narrative writing skills. The teachers had two 2-hour training sessions to learn how to lead and facilitate these sessions. Teachers were rotated among groups to ensure that teacher differences would not unevenly influence the quality of the writing. This was a thoughtful and validating feature of the design.

All three student groups began each week together in a 15-minute session discussing the various aspects of narrative writing. This included issues, characters, settings, dialogue, endings, and other aspects of narrative writing. Then each experimental group broke off on its own to continue a 45-minute session of either drawing or drama exercises followers by a 30-minute session of writing. The control group followed with a traditional lesson plan from a school text.

The writing exercises were rated every week. The researchers developed the rating scale based on both holistic and analytic scoring plans. They first registered overall impressions and then scored individuals on overall writing skills, ideas, organization, style, and context. The multiple assessors in this study attained an inter-rater reliability of 96.—J.C.

RESULTS

This study found that when the curriculum is designed to develop specific writing skills and the teachers are trained on the substance and implementation of the planned exercises, drama and drawing can significantly improve the quality of narrative writing for second- and third-graders. This is consistent with a limited number of other studies that have used drawing to enhance writing, and a more abundant array of studies that connect dramatic activities with verbal skills and writing proficiency.

Repeat-measure Analyses of Variance (ANOVAs) were used to test for significant differences in narrative writing skills across the three groups. In general, the differences between the program and control students were substantial and significant at p >.0O1 (i.e., the chance that the true differences were zero was less than 1 in 1,000). The authors conduce that drama and drawing are an effective method to warm up or rehearse students in ways that boost narrative writing performance.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study makes significant contributions to our understanding of roles dramatic activities can play in the development of writing skills. The results show statistically significant differences between the overall narrative writing scores of both the drama and drawing groups in comparison to the control group. Drama and drawing were equally effective, but since writing was assessed weekly, the authors were able to observe that the drawing group started out more slowly in effectiveness before its participants caught up with the drams group. The design of the study itself is also a contribution to this area of research, particularly its attention to the dynamics of learning over the 15 weeks and its clear descriptions of the tested activities. The authors do more than most researchers to explain the study's specific drama and interactive activities.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

The authors present a very anchored study. Their review of the literature displays an exceedingly comprehensive list of resources and references. Moore and Caldwell are working with an understanding of the existing knowledge and theories in their field. The design of the study is very high in quality. The pre- and post-testing and analytic designs are well conceived; scale reliability tests are strong. Although the authors designed the tests and evaluation criteria, independent assessors analyzed the results. What is being measured is very clear. The study applied to second- and third-graders, but seems to have implications for a wider group of students. The overall clarity of description would permit this study to be used as model for other programs.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

The study's results support the ideas that pre-writing planning activities are important for second- and third-graders and that the multi-modal work—drama and drawing—contributes to development in a third communication area—writing. It is important work the results of which should be recognized.

Staff development work with teachers in preparation for this study was extensive and, over time, seems to have been both persuasive and effective. The primary conclusion that such time is needed for the implementation of practices that link disciplines and activities is an important one for others who do this work to consider. As time for staff development becomes less and less available in our crowded school schedules, such a lesson should not be forgotten.—T.B.

COMMENTARY

The authors of this study place their work in the context of a growing body of research by scholars in other fields who have documented the effects of "planning" or pre-writing on student writing and who have developed support for multi-modal approaches using drama and drawing that have the process of composition in common with a third communication system (writing). This multi-modal instructional characteristic is one that others seeking to relate or integrate instruction from different domains should consider. The strength of the mufti-modal approach cannot be judged from the abbreviated presentation used in this paper, but the expanding number of such studies suggests that the topic is an important one to those engaged in studying and teaching writing processes.

The fact that this study is a large-scale one, conducted over several weeks of time and involving a varied group of teachers, just as you would find in a real school system, makes the research especially important. The control group is significantly like a traditional language arts group so few should question the results of the study. Every opportunity seems to have been provided for all the groups to be successful.

Similar work with students of different ages would be interesting. The positive results need to be highlighted in more widely read journals than the Educational Researcher. The linkages to studies in other areas—modalities—are important to note and to point out to those in schools who question the value of integrated work. Arts-in-education personnel who use integration or infusion approaches should know that there are others doing work with similar concepts in other disciplines and are finding research that supports their efforts. A little transfer to arts in education would be nice.—T.B.

METHODS

This study tests for differential effects on story understanding brought through dramatizing stories versus listening to adults reading stories. A traditional experimental approach to such a question would be random assignment of subjects to two groups, exposing one to dramatization and one to listening, and comparing effects for the two conditions. This study takes an added step to boost the validity of claims made on behalf of either treatment. The study is carried out in two phases so that any pre-existing advantage to either group in a paired comparison is essentially nullified, in the first phase, one of the two first-grade groups listens to a story read by a teacher. The other group listens to an audiotape of the same story and proceeds to engage in a dramatic enactment of the story. The same routine is carried out for the two second-/third-grade groups. Children are tested for story understanding through a 10-item test of comprehension, a picture sequencing instrument, and a telling of the story by each child to an interviewer. In the repeat phase, the same procedures and measures are carried out, but the groups who listened to a teacher-read story now hear the audiotape and proceed with an enactment—and vice versa. The author reports careful attention to the vocabulary, structure, plot, and complexity of the two stories involved in the respective phases of the study. As described, the stories were equivalent in potentially important respects such as length, structure, and vocabulary level.

In addition to testing for several main effects across each pair, the author examines effects at the first-grade level versus the second-/third-grade level. The author attends to the basic reading levels of subjects by referencing student files.—J.C.

RESULTS

This study reports several significant results. One is that children are more engaged during dramatizations than when just listening. Another is that several key ingredients of story understanding are better conveyed through drama: main ides, character identification, and character motivation. These are essential elements of comprehension. Both modes are effective in promoting recall of story sequence, story details, and story vocabulary.

Beyond the main treatment versus comparison group effects, drama had more effects on the younger (grade one) students than the older students (grades two and three). The author draws a reasonable inference that drama in this study was more beneficial for less developed readers than for more developed readers, signified at first by the grade-level distinction. When outcomes are compared for students within groups by reading level, this inference is reinforced. Story understanding effects are greatest for first-graders reading below grade level.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study offers firmly grounded evidence of certain benefits of using drama in the classroom to enhance children's story understanding. One result, a finding seen commonly in drama and the arts in education more generally, is that children are "more engaged and involved through drama" than they are through storytelling by teachers reading from books. Another result is an indication that drama is more effective in promoting story understanding for very young children (first-graders) than it is for second- and third-graders. A corollary is that children with lower reading skills, and those reading below grade level, are the greatest potential beneficiaries of enacting stories in order to understand them.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

Many studies link dramatizing text to enhanced understanding, particularly increased story understanding and reading comprehension. Such studies receive much attention in this Compendium. Story understanding through spoken and written presentations was also featured in the Podlozny meta-analysis summarized in this volume, an analysis that examined the effects of 109 studies of classroom drama published since 1950.

This study could be considered an anchor study in this domain. One reason is its very strong and appropriate experimental design; a second is that its focus on story comprehension represents the modal work in the area of drama and academic learning. But its influence on the literature surrounding learning through drama may have been limited because it is available as a doctoral dissertation and not through a more widely accessible outlet such as a book chapter or journal article.

The study's research methods are of particular value and worth comment up front. The study went beyond a simple treatment and control group design to test its hypotheses. The author used randomization to establish two pairs of comparison groups (a first-grade pair and a second-/third-grade pair) and followed a clever design, which repeated the intervention so that both groups at each level received the drama treatment once as part of the experiment.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study makes an important contribution to thinking about how drama can be used to teach reading. It suggests that the dramatic arts (storytelling with dramatic effect and story dramatization by students) can improve reading comprehension. Additionally, it highlights how children are more engaged and involved in learning when participating in story dramatization rather than listening to storytelling by the teacher. Rather than being passive receivers of knowledge, students who make dramatic presentations of stories may reach a deeper involvement in a story, particularly students who are reading below grade level. In the current political climate, which emphasizes the importance of basic literacy, this study shows how the dramatic arts can contribute to and improve basic skills.—C.G.-P.

COMMENTARY

As the author notes, one of the most common approaches to teaching reading is having a teacher read a story to students. The study suggests that the dramatic arts could be a useful addition to reading programs and assist students with story comprehension, particularly when students are active participants in story dramatization. The deeper implication of this, as the author suggests, is that while elementary teachers are supportive of creative dramatics, many do not actually use classroom drama in their classrooms. This points to the need to understand why many teachers do not use dramatic arts to increase literacy,…C.G.-P.

METHODS

This was a development and evaluation project. After establishing the four project and control classrooms, the principals, teachers, artists. and evaluators met to develop goals, agree on assessment criteria, and train teachers and artists for implementing what resulted as this version of a Whirlwind curriculum, (Since Whirlwind works with teachers and schools to develop programs, it might be said the Whirlwind Program is a program development process. It is not Whirlwind that is being evaluated or researched in a given setting, but rather the specific product of the collaboration in that setting…a customized and implemented design).

After an initial planning and design period, the teachers from each participating class collaborated with an opera singer and an actor from Whirlwind for 20 one-hour sessions over 10 weeks. The 20 sessions each focused on a reading and dramatic-presentation exercise designed in a collaboration between the teachers and artists. The dramatic exercises began simply—with solo short enactments—and became more complex and involved more children overtime. The activities grew from the planners' collective sense of particular drama exercises that would enhance particular reading skills. The performance assessment sessions were audio- and videotaped as well as scored on a protocol with 23 agreed-upon criteria. The evaluation report contains information describing the drama activities and exercises that were used in each session. The report appendices include a description of the exercises used for the performance assessments and the evaluation criteria as well as other statistical information.

Four elementary schools representing diverse mixes of student race/ethnicities and differing geographic areas served by the Chicago Public School System ware chosen for participation. All four schools had hosted Whirlwind programs in previous years and thus had established working relations with the sponsor. Within each of the four schools, all fourth-grade teachers were invited to participate and all teachers accepted the invitation. Within each school, two classrooms were chosen randomly for inclusion in this study, and between each of these pairs of classes, one was chosen randomly for participation and the other enlisted as a comparison classroom, receiving no special program.

What resulted was a 10-week drama program, two hours per week, which engaged four classes of fourth-grade students in each of four schools, which were then compared to four control classes, one in each of the respective schools. Ninety-four fourth-graders participated (classes of 21,24,24, and 25 students) and 85 students made up the control group (classes of 22, 28, 25, and 10). Professional artists worked together with the classroom teachers. The three components of each session included "Game Time" for physical and vocal warm-up and getting focused, "Acting" for advancing acting skills and applying these to specific narratives, and "Observation/Conversing" for writing in journals and discussing the work of die session. At the end of the 10 weeks there was a specific theater presentation exercise along with a performance assessment. In the spring prior to the program year and in the spring at the close of the program year students were given a section of the lowa Test of Basic Skills designed to measure reading comprehension.—J.C.

RESULTS

Participant students' reading comprehension scores on the lowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) improved three months more (in the standard grade-level metric) than the control group, with high statistical significance. ITBS scores improved the most with respect to student ability to identify factual information from written text. On the formal performance assessment created by the collaborating team, the program students improved significantly more than control students in reading comprehension, drama skills, and nonverbal expression of information inferred from a written text. Participants also improved three times more than the control group in nonverbal ability to express factual material. Program students did not improve relative to controls in reading ability measured through verbal expression in contrast to a written assessment.

The design of this study supports contentions that the program did in fact promote subject developments in both reading skills and nonverbal communications skills. This study supports general rationales for including drama programs in the reading and communication curricula for elementary schools.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study is a good illustration of strong evaluation/research design, execution, and reporting. There are many attractive elements in this study, apart from the substantive student educational experiences involved. This rendition of the Whirlwind program involved: (1) good numbers of subjects (four participant classrooms plus four control classrooms—about 180 students in all); (2) sensible, purposeful selection of four diverse Chicago schools from which to randomly choose classrooms; (3) random selection of both participant and control classrooms among teachers expressing a desire to participate; (4) a full year between nationally recognized pre- and post-measures of reading comprehension skills; and (5) an outside evaluation team. Perhaps the strongest component of the study design is that all classroom teachers, program and control alike, had self-selected in favor of participation in advance.

The study offers a useful model of multi-outcome assessment within a program evaluation, and a sound model for the creation of the program and assessment design by multiple program constituents. The study adds to a general body of literature connecting drama interventions to verbal skills and adds novel contributions in its design, use, and results of systematic performance assessments.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

The collaboration process among the teachers, artists, principals, and researchers designing the program, well described in the study report, can serve as a model for other programs because of the detail of program elements presented. This is a good example of reporting both program development and operation and also the results of the work. This is a high-quality study amidst a field of programs combining arts and education. There is enough accessible information about the various aspects of the design, implementation, and evaluation process for most educators, artists, and researchers to use this information as the foundation for their own projects.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study adds to the literature that documents the positive effects of drama on reading performance. It is noteworthy because of the careful effort to draw comparable control and comparison classrooms, matching both student and school characteristics.

The findings are made more robust by including not only standardized test scores but also more tailored performance assessments.

The sample of low-income, urban students of color exposed to drama showed impressive gains in grade-equivalent terms of three months more than the control group.—B.W.

COMMENTARY

There are two notes of caution about interpreting these generally positive findings. First, while classrooms were randomly assigned to control (no drama) and experimental conditions (twice weekly instruction for 10 weeks), there was no assessment of the general quality of reading instruction received by the control and experimental classrooms. An alternative hypothesis may be that the impressive lowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) score increases were more a function of differential instruction. Second, while it was impressive to see a performance assessment that complemented standardized test score measures, the results from this test were more ambiguous than the authors portrayed. The performance assessment was divided into five subscales. The three subscales related to reading (verbal fluency, factual recall, and verbal inference) revealed no difference between the control and experimental classrooms. The two nonverbal drama subscales (acting out factual recall and dramatizing inferences) did show important differences. This latter finding should not be surprising because the control groups had no drama instruction.

The positive findings for this population of students, who often do poorly on standardized tests of achievement, may offer some hope for schools struggling to reduce the achievement gap between poor urban schools and their more wealthy suburban counterparts. More research needs to be undertaken to address the role the arts may play in this.

While the research provides adequate information for replication (with the exception of drama curriculum), the research leaves open the important question of whether students would do even better on reading assessments if they had regular, ongoing classroom drama instruction (as opposed to a special 10-week treatment) in an environment where drama instruction was regarded as an important core subject rather than an extra, add-on class.—B.W.

METHODS

This study engaged 108 children in grades K-2 from a rural school in northeast Georgia (18 boys and 18 girls in each of the three grades). The children were read three books by adults, one each, on three separate occasions. After each reading the children were exposed to one of three conditions for processing and exploring what they heard: thematic-fantasy play, discussion, or drawing. The first two story listening and processing episodes were considered training sessions; the third story reading was used far a formal test. Story comprehension was measured by a criterion-referenced test gauging story recall and student judgments about the story or its characters. Story understanding was also measured through the use of a scaled story-retelling task.—J.C.

RESULTS

Kindergartners and first-graders who participated in thematic-fantasy play scored significantly higher in story comprehension than their peers in both the discussion and drawing groups. There were no significant differences in story comprehension across training conditions for second- graders. Separate analyses explored total story recall and recall of sequence of events. The thematic-fantasy play groups recalled a significantly higher number of the events from the stories that they heard than both the discussion and drawing groups. The thematic-fantasy play groups also scored significantly better on sequence recall than did either the discussion or drawing groups, and were more successful in answering judgmental questions. Finally, for kindergartners, the centrality of the role played in the thematic-fantasy play event was positively linked to story recall (e.g., being the wolf in "Little Red Riding Hood" was about twice as effective in producing story recall as playing the grandmother).—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

How we come to understand things we hear or read is a crucial question in education and human development. There are many different strategies used for processing and developing an understanding of new material. In graduate student seminars, for example, lectures or readings are usually followed by discussions as a strategy for processing information and furthering understanding. This study looks at the various ways in which children in kindergarten through second grade process information. The analysis finds that "thematic-fantasy play," or taking on a role and acting out all or part of a story, contributes more to measured story comprehension than two familiar alternative "information processing" activities in grade school, namely adult-led discussion and drawing exercises. This study concludes that children become more active, interactive, and effective information explorers when acting out a story than when reviewing the story through adult-led discussions or when drawing to illustrate a scene or theme from a story.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

Pellegrini and Galda suggest through this study that thematic-fantasy play requires children to accommodate the views of others in order to initiate and sustain play and that this gives them broader information recall than those children who are limited to discussion or drawing activities. They also find that children engaging in fantasy play are more successful in answering judgmental questions (questions requiring a critical stance) posed about the characters and situations. These questions require children to "take on simultaneously the role perspectives of the actor and the ideal (i.e., portrayed character} role." The findings of this study are consistent with other research cited by the authors, which holds that fantasy play, in asking children to conserve their own identity as well as take on a fantasy role, facilitates the ability to take a critical stance toward the, meaning of the story and the identity of its characters.

This study is well designed and moderately extensive in scale (using 108 subjects and three iterations of the experiment before taking final measurements). The work involved a tight experimental design including randomization of children to groups and adults to facilitative and training roles. The researchers used systematic content assessment tests and formal guides to assess stories told by subjects and to measure outcomes.

This study, but no more than most, might be criticized for what it does not explore—particularly for not considering specific aspects of fantasy play that could impact story comprehension. For example, research on the importance of kinetic activity in language development, especially for kindergartners, suggests that purposeful movement may play a part in the effectiveness of fantasy play for this group. Future studies could look at how different aspects of thematic-fantasy play, such as social interaction or kinetic play, may account for the measured impacts. Studies could also explore different modes of discussion activities or different levels of skills of the adults leading discussions—certainly a variable that could prove important to the generalizations suggested by this study.

As described in this Compendium's summary of another Pellegrini study (Pellegrini 1984), both studies draw from the same experiment, but frame and measure different outcomes for the children and groups involved.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

The results of this small (108 children) study outline a very brief intervention where young children were read a story by an experimenter other than the classroom teacher. Students then engaged the story either by drawing a picture, talking about the story with an adult, or acting out the story with three peers and an adult. Students were then tested using both a criterion-referenced test and a test of recall. The results highlighted the fact that higher comprehension occurs when students can reconstruct a story through thematic-fantasy play than through either discussion or drawing. This research illustrates the value of using dramatic play to enhance students' story comprehension.—B.W.

COMMENTARY

These results, while exploring the value of different reading recall interventions, are limited for several reasons. First, the 10-item criterion-referenced test is divided into two factors: story-related and judgmental intelligence. Inadequate information is provided about the validity of these two constructs. Second, the presentation of the findings leaves out many important statistics. For example, analyses of variance (a statistical technique used to assess the effect of different variables} were discussed for the two factors with details by grade level for the first factor but not for the second. Likewise, detailed results were presented by grade for a separate assessment of total recall and sequencing recall (the second outcome measured in this study). Yet, discussion of the analyses of variance collapsed these grade-level distinctions. Finally, the authors incorporated student gender into the analysis but did not include that variable in another published study of the same students with the same experimental intervention. Why not?

The research begins to explore some important issues and points to questions to be addressed by future research: What would be the effect of a more naturally occurring fantasy-play intervention (e.g., in a regular classroom setting) on student comprehension? To what degree does regular, routine fantasy play—as a central part of the curriculum—impact student comprehension? How significant is the role of an adult as a catalyst to stimulate fantasy play? How important is age or developmental readiness to the issue of comprehension for older students?—B.W.

METHODS

Sixty-five kindergartners (37 males and 28 females) took part in the study. All kindergartners in the rural school involved were invited to participate, and those whose parents gave permission joined the study. The investigators first administered Robinson's Test of Writing Fluency to assess student ability to write isolated whole words—the development of central concern in the research.

Beginning two weeks following the writing fluency test, researchers observed all children during their free-play periods over four weeks. Each student was observed five times, with each observation lasting 20 minutes. The observers recorded descriptions of play episodes according to a typology or hierarchy of play considered to involve differing levels of "cognitive/symbolic" functioning. These include functional play (exercising musdes/movement), constructive play (creating something), dramatic play (using language in the service of a pretend role), and games with rules (play subordinated to a pre-arranged set of rules). The latter two types of play—drama and games with rules—are more cognitively demanding because they involve using language for socially shared symbols that a allow children to sustain play.

The researchers conducted analyses of variance to test whether observed play-style differences among the four categories were associated with different levels of measured writing fluency.

The researchers also used several individual-level variables in a regression model to test the influences of gender, age, and socio-economic status, as well as observed type of play, on writing fluency.—J.C.

RESULTS

The analyses of variance showed that among the play styles observed, dramatic play had the strongest effect on isolated word writing. The regression analysis showed that of the four factors examined (gender, age, SES, and play style), only differences in play style (to be more specific, play styles using more symbolic functioning) had a significant main effect on isolated word writing fluency. (Note: the author uses the term "main effect," a standard attribution to significant correlations (actually partial coefficients) in a regression model. "Association" would be a more accurate term than "effect" in this study's regression analysis, since direction of influence cannot be inferred from the data).

The author provides a concise theoretical framework through which these observations might be understood. As children discover that individual letters bear meaning and that individual words represent things, they increase in their abilities and dispositions to use symbolic expression. Such developments would show up on tests of isolated word writing. Researchers exploring play prior to this study took interest in the levels of symbolic functioning during children's play. Building on that tradition, this study found that the more a child engaged in dramatic play, a type of play demanding symbolic functioning, the better that child tended to perform in writing words, an action implying the use of symbolism.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

Most research on the influence of drama on academic performance addresses verbal stills at or above the beginning reading levels typically shown by first-graders—that is, an ability to decode simple words and to read very simple sentences. This study broadens the literature through its focus on very early and simple individual word fluency in writing. The research finds positive relations between level of "symbolic functioning" (witnessed across a variety of play styles including dramatic enactment) and word fluency. Symbolic functioning refers to using "…symbols, or signs [to] represent other classes of objects or concepts."

A second important contribution of this study is that it differentiates among types of play and assesses the relative effects of each form within the study. The question explored by' this study was not play versus no play, nor dramatic play versus some "control" activity. The research investigates differences in effects of what are defined above as functional play, constructive play, dramatic play, and games with rules. These types of play are considered to involve different levels of symbolic expression (or symbolic functioning) and thus are expected to associate with different levels of writing fluency. The study finds that among the forms of play explored, dramatic play had the strongest association with word writing fluency.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

This study adds to the body of research focusing on early childhood literacy. Much of the existing research focuses on the study of writing competency at the higher end of the continuum for developing writers, i.e., children writing words organized into phrases or sentences. In this study, Pellegrini specifically targets isolated word writing fluency with the understanding that this is a crucial beginning component in the process of becoming literate. He then looks at the possible contributions that certain factors make to such emerging literacy in order to suggest what might be incorporated into the curriculum to help augment the process of literacy development for young people.

In linking fantasy play and very young children's abilities to write words through close observation, Pellegrini assumes that the symbolic processes used in dramatic play are similar to the symbolic processes used to write individual words.

This hints at a critical limitation of this study. All measures were essentially simultaneous, and the research question thus became—what sorts of play styles associate with what sorts of word fluency? No firm claims can be made about which causes which. There is reason to believe that play styles would contribute to written word fluency; it is also reasonable to think that children with higher levels of written word fluency might play in different styles.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study adds to the literature on the contribution of free play (as an expression of artistic endeavor) to writing fluency. Sixty-five kindergarten students were each observed during five 20-minute play sessions over the course of a four-week period. The findings suggest that more complex play (i.e., dramatic play) is strongly associated with higher achievement in writing.—B.W.

COMMENTARY

Through some unspecific process, each child's 100 minutes of play were reduced to a single number: 1=functional, 2=constructive, or 3=dramatic. It seems questionable that such play can accurately be reduced to a single number. These scores were then included in a series of regressions to test the relationship between categories of play, other potentially important predictive factors (age, gender, and SES), and the ability to write isolated words. The small sample size pushes the limits of being able to meaningfully apply multiple regression techniques.

Assuming that the numbers can be meaningfully interpreted, the author ends the report with an important discussion about the implications of the findings for teaching. The significance of viewing students as active, not passive, learners cannot be underestimated. Furthermore, helpful suggestions of how teachers might assist students actively choose objects to be symbolically transformed serves as a good model for translating complex theoretical issues into the domain of classroom practice.—B.W.

METHODS

One hundred and ninety-two children in kindergarten and first grade from a predominantly African-American, high-poverty school in rural northeast Georgia took part in this study. The children were randomly assigned to one of four groups: adult-directed play, peer-directed play, accommodation questioning (facilitated discussion), or control. An adult read a story to the children on three separate occasions, and after each reading the children "processed" the story according to their assigned treatment or control (no additional organized story processing) condition. Corresponding to other Pellegrini study designs, the first two sessions were essentially carried out for practice, The third session provided the opportunity for data collection and analysis. After the third story-reading session, the children carried out their respective processing activities and then were tested in three different ways. First, the children were given a 10-item criterion-referenced test for recall of narrative details. They were then asked to retell the story to an experimenter who audiotaped and later scored the retelling according to a formal scoring guide. Finally, the children were asked to lay out the sequence of the story by placing a set of pictures in order according to their recall of the story's plot. The children were given repeat testing on the CRT and the retelling task one week later to assess sustained story recall. Analyses of variance were conducted to test for score differences across the four groups.—J.C.

RESULTS

This study finds that the thematic-fantasy play condition generally (whether adult or peer directed) was more effective for immediate story recall than was assistance through accommodation questioning or no assistance at all (the control group). But thematic-fantasy play was more effective than other groups in promoting sustained story recall in only one of six sustained-recall tests (the CRT for kindergartners). The fact that an impact on sustained recall was seen only for kindergartners aligns with Page's study (summarized in this Compendium), where the effects of dramatic enactment on story understanding were strongest for younger children (K as opposed to grades one or two)—and for weaker readers. The observation that effects are limited in duration raises some caution in leaping to grandiose conclusions from the very large majority of studies that do not test for sustaining effects.

In teasing out behaviors within dramatic enactment that contribute to story recall, the authors find that verbal interaction among peers, which to varying degrees is characteristic of fantasy play, enables children to construct narrative structures and thus to demonstrate better story recall. This study also found that both adult-directed and peer-directed play were equally effective in facilitating children's story recall, indicating that adult assistance did not play an important role in thematic-fantasy play training.

This study further suggests that fantasy play may assist children in developing conflict-resolution skills. Fantasy play often results in disagreements regarding plot development and the role each child is allowed to play. In order to sustain play, children often resolve these conflicts themselves. This conflict/resolution cycle allows the children to broaden their perspectives of an event by seeing through the eyes of their peers. This process deepens their understanding of a story as well as fosters a cooperative learning environment.

Finally, this study implies but does not grapple with an interesting problem of generalization. Since the study population was reported to be very homogeneous—predominantly African-American and low-SES—can we say that its results are confined to such populations or should they be considered more widely? There is no ready answer to this question, other than to find or generate replication studies with other populations. When examining studies with other populations, a few important questions should be explored: Is the adult assistance phenomenon in some way related to culture? Are the results of this study tied to the base-line reading and narrative-recall proficiencies of the study population, which are not described? And finally, are the observations about conflict resolution influenced by the homogeneity of this study school's culture, and would things work differently in a school populated by highly diverse cultures or home languages?—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study builds on previous work in understanding the positive roles that fantasy re-enactment can play in facilitating cognitive development, especially language-related skills. (See for example, Pellegrini & Galda, 1982, summarized in this Compendium). This study informs an important question left largely unaddressed in previous studies: Does adult involvement influence the outcome of play experiments? The results of this part of the study may interest teachers, classroom aides, and parent classroom volunteers. By age 5, children do not appear to need adults to sustain play and both peer-directed and adult-directed play groups can be equally effective in facilitating story recall. The study also contributes as one of few experiments measuring sustained as opposed to relatively immediate effects. (Drama modestly influenced sustained recall for the youngest subjects only). The study also embraces a little-studied potential effect of drama—the impact of story enactment on conflict resolution. The verdict on this effect is yes,—J.C.

COMMENTARY

The results of this experiment add significantly to the research on the benefits of thematic-fantasy play as an instructional practice. The study also illustrates, along with others reviewed in this Compendium, the traditions of careful research design and thoughtful question generation by Pellegrini and colleagues during the early 1980s. These works were published in top educational psychology journals, in contrast to much (but certainly not all) of what we are able to find in research on drama and theater in education.

A characteristic of this and the other Pellegrini studies is that they formally test for the effects of conditions within dramatic enactment, and not only for the effect of using drama versus no drama. That is to say, this research attempts to tease out conditions within the use of drama in the classroom, which may influence its success. The researcher explores the effects of particular factors on the outcome of the interventions examined (e.g., the effect of adult involvement on children's fantasy play), as well as the interaction of multiple factors within the intervention (e.g., the relationship between grade level and treatment). In addition, there are two related details in the results that are worth highlighting here. One is that the research largely found no sustaining effects of thematic-fantasy play on story recall, in assessments only one week later. Another is that the sustaining effects that were observed were found only for kindergartners and not for first-graders. This aligns with the Page, Pellegrini, and Wagner studies (summarized in this Compendium), which found story understanding effects through drama stronger or present only for their younger subjects.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

What is intriguing about this study is that it suggests that for kindergartners peer-directed play can be as effective as adult-directed play at facilitating a student's immediate and maintained story recall. For kindergartners, not only is the dramatic use of thematic-fantasy play a more effective method for immediate story recall than accommodation questions, but the students themselves can be important effective facilitators of this method. This approach suggests that kindergartners can independently aid in their own learning through fantasy play.—C.G.-P.

COMMENTARY

The study suggests that children in kindergarten, regardless of whether they are middle class or of lower socio-economic status, do not need an adult to assist them in maintaining fantasy play. However, the school in which the study was conducted was identified by the authors as "a predominantly LSES (lower socio-economic status) black school in rural northeast Georgia". It appears the sample was not representative of LSES Caucasian students or middle-class students. Thus, questions remain about its generalizability to these groups.—C.G.-P.

METHODS

This study involves 108 students (54 girls and 54 boys) ranging in educational level from kindergarten to second grade. The students were divided into same-age groups of four (two boys and two girls) and then randomly assigned to one of three conditions describing the activities that they would engage in prior to retelling a story to an adult social dramatic play, discussion, or drawing. There were two experimenters, one male and one female, who were also randomly assigned to different groups and conditions.

An adult read a children's book to each group on three separate occasions. After each reading session, the children were separated into their treatment conditions to process the story by the means assigned. Individual children were then asked to retell the story to an experimenter. One-half of the children retold the story to the experimenter who had read the story to them (i.e., an "informed" listener). The other half retold the story to the other experimenter, who claimed not to have heard of the story (i.e., a "naïve" listener). Retelling sessions were audiotaped, and student responses were analyzed. The first two reading, processing, and retelling sequences were done for practice. Data were collected on the third rendition.

In order to analyze the students' ability to convey meaning during story retelling, the researchers looked for and marked elements of cohesion within the students' narratives, noting particularly the level of cohesion generated by gestures and language that recognized the comprehensive informational needs of the unfamiliar listener.—J.C.

RESULTS

Pellegrini found that students using dramatic play to think about, review, and otherwise process the story they had just heard were more likely to use explicit language when retelling their stories than students in either the discussion or drawing groups. That is, they were better at producing a retelling that would be coherent and make sense to a listener who die not already know the story. Pellegrini makes a critical point, that conveying meaning explicitly is an important skill and one that is traditionally valued and rewarded, both in school and in later-life instances of communication.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This is an important study as it focuses on intriguing aspects of literacy: how an individual conveys meaning, and the importance of the knowledge base of the listener (as told to the child in advance) in how children retell stories. This study concludes that students' oral language varies according to listener status and that dramatic play is an effective preparation instrument for fostering the use of explicit language (i.e., conveying stories effectively to those who do not know anything about the stories in advance). It is crucial to foster these language skills, particularly in school settings, where children are expected to use explicit language in most written and oral language activities.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

It should be noted that this study is based on the same sample of children and cluster of experiments reported two years earlier in Pellegrini & Galda (1982) (also summarized in this Compendium). It is not uncommon in academia, as is done here, for experiments to be mounted with two or more differing effects assessments in mind—including the use of separate instruments to compare differing outcomes attained by treatment versus control groups. This 1984 study reports on the effects of alternative strategies impacting student ability to retell stories, while the 1982 study reports the impact of alternative story-processing strategies (discussion, drawing, and dramatic play) on the development of children's story comprehension.

The specific target of this study is more subtle than the direct measures of comprehension and language skills assessed in most of the studies we include in this section of the Compendium. Effective reading, writing, and oral-language production require more than what we might call first-order skills—decoding words and sentences or crafting grammatically correct oral or written declarations. At a higher order, words, sentences, and paragraphs are understood in context, and listeners and readers as well as speakers and writers succeed in some proportion to this realization. This study recognizes that an effective retelling of a story should account for what the listener may already know about it and, more specifically, should take into account situations where an audience is uninitiated. Dramatic play appears to increase tendencies of children to be thorough and explicit in their narratives in situations where this is needed.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This research, based on listening to 108 students retell stories (as relayed to students in an experimental setting), makes an important contribution to the understanding of how students make meaning from what they learn by listening to adults. This research demonstrates that acting out a story produces better understanding than either just talking about it or drawing a picture of what was learned. This meaning-making, through hands-on learning opportunities, is a significant piece of the knowledge-base puzzle on literacy.—B.W.

COMMENTARY

A couple of research shortcomings limit interpretation of this study. First, an incomplete explanation of the outcome measures (i.e., what students learned after listening to a story) makes it difficult to interpret the findings. For example, students' meaning-making was defined by exodorphic and exodorphic elements (author's language). These two elements were further subdivided into reference and ellipsis categories, each of which was further differentiated by three different subcategories. Thus, 12 different outcome measures were constructed. But the reader was given no explanation of how to interpret the quantitative score for any of these. What does it mean to produce a score of 9.15 for the exodorphic category in response to the informed listener? Second, the one table of results for this study presents means and standard deviations for each of the 12 outcome measures, broken out by story reconstruction training and condition of the adult listener. Yet most of the analysis of effects, using the statistical technique of analysis of variance, collapses many of these subcategories. This approach makes it difficult to follow and interpret the results. Finally, the authors incorporated the status of the adult listener into the analysis but did not include that variable in another published study of the same students with the same experimental intervention. Why not?

The research helps identify important conditions (i.e., more active learning environments where students use the arts to engage content) where students' literacy might be enhanced. But it leaves unanswered the effect of a more naturally occurring drama intervention (e.g., in a regular classroom setting) on students' oral language. To what degree does regular play-acting—as a central part of the curriculum—impact students' use of oral language? The research also poses a real challenge for teachers because typical classroom environments often permit implied, shared assumptions that naturally foster more exodorphic explanations. Because enhanced literacy relies heavily on students' offering more explicit meaning from what they are learning, what specific steps might teachers take to design better learning environments? It is more complex than just fostering dramatic play.—B.W.

METHODS

Podlozny framed her review of instructional practices in three dimensions of drama: enactment, plot, and the leader's level of involvement. Within these framing or defining categories, she set seven verbal outcomes to be examined: story understanding (oral measures), story understanding (written measures), reading achievement, reading readiness, oral language development, vocabulary, and writing. Two hundred studies conducted since 1950 were identified, from which 80 were selected according to criteria that included having at least one measure of verbal achievement, being experimental in design, and having sufficient information for an effect size to be calculated. The researcher and one assistant coded all studies. A five percent rate of disagreement in the coding was resolved in rechecking texts. After calculating average effect sizes across the groupings, the nine hypotheses were tested regarding the influence of specific factors associated with the hypotheses. These included substantive variables related to type of treatment or type of participant method variables related to research methods, and extrinsic variables such as date of publication or publication status.—T.B.

RESULTS

For the first meta-analysis of 17 studies assessing the effect of drama on story understanding and recall measured orally, the effect sizes ranged from r=.00 to r=.66. The confidence interval range of r=.16 to r=.34 does not span zero—the necessary condition for establishing statistical confidence, allowing a finding that there is a relationship between drama and oral story understanding/recall. The finding that the effect sizes for this meta-analysis were significantly heterogeneous led to the testing of possible relationships with a variety of other variables.

With an effect size range of r=.00 to r=.96 and a confidence interval range of r=.37 to r=.73, it was concluded that there is a relationship between drama and story understanding as expressed in the form of written measures (meta-analysis 2). Further analysis of variables stimulated by the heterogeneous nature of the effect sizes for this group led to the surprising conclusion that drama instruction might be more effective for low-SES populations and remedial readers. Previous meta-analyses found that average populations benefited more from drama study.

The third meta-analysis examined reading achievement using standardized tests. The range of effect sizes was r=.15 to r=.56, and the confidence interval ranged from r=.11 to r=.29, allowing a conclusion that there is a relationship between drama instruction and reading achievement.

Meta-analysis 4 studied reading readiness and had a range of effect sizes of r=-.03 to r=.66. The calculated confidence interval of r=.15 to r=.36 supported the conclusion that there is a relationship between drama instruction and reading readiness.

The text of the report for meta-analysis 5 on oral language development states that the range of effect sizes was from r=-.04 to r=.73. The calculated confidence interval of from r=.20 to r=.41 allows the conclusion that there is a relationship between drama instruction and oral language development.

Meta-analysis 6 was the only one to find no relationship with effect sizes ranging from r=-.20 to r=.37 and a confidence interval of r=-.07 to r=.19. The results show that there is no reliable relationship between drama instruction and vocabulary development.

Meta-analysis 7 examined eight studies of writing achievement. The confidence interval on the effect sizes ranged from r=.09 to r=.52 and supported the conclusion that there is a relationship between drama instruction and writing achievement.

Overall, the results of this rather massive meta-analysis are "very encouraging for educators who use drama in the classroom in expectations of achieving greater verbal development. "The author also notes that the studies indicate that there is evidence of transfer to new material in these reports, perhaps indicating that "...transfer of skills from one domain to another is not automatic, it needs to be taught,"—T.B.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This report makes substantial contributions to the fields of drama education and arts education research Because it includes information confirming positive correlations, the report will encourage teachers, teaching artists, and school administrators to include drama in their classroom practice. In the same way, the report also makes a contribution to the expansion of instructional practice in the everyday classroom.

The report's contribution to researchers is at least twofold: it uses a meta-analysis procedure that is properly based on grouping comparable studies, and it identifies a rich variety of weaknesses in the studies while making recommendations for corrective steps and future research strategies that could deepen the research base in drama education. The discussion of weaknesses such as a lack of conversation among researchers, the rare replication of studies, an absence of consistence of measures, and the lack of set operational definitions of such labels as "drama," "socio-drama," and "creative dramatics" does not condemn the effort but encourages renewed research conducted with greater care and precision. Such a stance can be viewed as a very positive contribution in light of the practice of many researchers to interpret weaknesses as signs of failure or as contraindications.—T.B.

COMMENTARY

Podlozny's work places the often-questioned practice of meta-analysis in the arts on much firmer ground. She carefully groups the 80 studies (she selected from among the 200 possible reports) in categories based on seven types of recognizable drama outcomes and compares sets of studies within each group rather than across the total set of studies. She is interested in specific outcome results rather than in "drama" as a singular field. This specificity establishes greater confidence in her work and makes it easier for drama educators to make connections to specific aspects of their own classroom work.

As part of her setting up of the context for this study, she reviews four separate, previous meta-analyses of drama studies and thereby establishes the need for the creation of the "finer sieve" of her own study. Her tone here, as always, is strong and clear without being condescending.

Methodologically, her effect size calculations and especially the additional analysis of other variables when the sizes were heterogeneous, gives further credence to the report and helps identify subtleties that could help teachers. For example, the surprising result that enacting a text makes a new text more comprehensible is interpreted as demonstration of the power of drama to develop text comprehension skills that transfer to new material.

The fact that eight of the nine hypotheses were supported, all but the vocabulary connection, is remarkable, given the usually negative reports of the study of positive correlations in arts education studies of transfer.—T.B.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This is a powerful meta-analysis presenting a synthesis of research on classroom drama. The contribution to the field is unparalleled. Positive effects are shown in six areas related to language development: written and oral measures of story recall, reading achievement, reading readiness, oral language development, and writing. The author's test for effects on vocabulary revealed a very weak influence.

Podlozny also examines the effects of specific characteristics of drama programs and types of participating students. These analyses cut across the body of studies independent of the various outcomes listed above. Programs involving structured plot or low-SES students show larger effects. So do studies using non-experimental research designs as well as studies that were published in academic journals or books.

Podlozny reports an important element of the studies she reviewed. This is that drama shows influences not only on children's understanding of enacted stories but on understanding of subsequently experienced unrelated texts (read or heard). She describes this as an instance of transfer of skills or knowledge.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

The portrait of drama in education advanced in this Compendium bears strong resemblance to that shown by Podlozny. Even though our selection process (biased toward rigorous comparison group designs and adding more recent works) distilled the field to 19 studies (Podlozny examined 80), the effects we report are quite similar. The lone apparent departure was our not identifying drama as a positive influence on reading readiness. Few studies claim to focus on reading readiness, even if they are related to early language development. For example, of the 80 studies referenced by Podlozny, only two include reading readiness in their titles. A close examination of the studies we include shows influences of drama activities on very early language development by 5-year-olds and kindergartners that could be considered developments in reading readiness.

Five Compendium studies show mild indications of transfer effects consistent with Podlozny's conclusions about reading—namely effects on reading comprehension, thoughtful writing, and on certain social skills outside the purview of Podlozny's review.

We also found good evidence that drama's effects are larger for students who get out of role to direct, provide leadership, or otherwise reflect on the process, (Meta-play is one term for these actions). In contrast, Podlozny did not find a substantial effect for students taking leader roles in drama.—J.C.

METHODS

A team of researchers studied two full seasons of the Shakespeare & Company's National Shakespeare Institute. A season consisted of a one-month teacher training experience in the summer and an associated Fall Festival of Shakespeare, where teams of trained artist-teachers work over two months with over 400 students in 10 schools to study and perform Shakespeare plays. The research staff visited the school programs, observed sessions, attended student performances, interviewed teacher and student participants, reviewed written materials, and talked with program faculty and administrators. The design was to look closely and systematically at the elements of the program in order to consider what made this program so successful I and to consider the prospects for transferring such a program to other settings. The research staff and participants held team meetings throughout the year and retreat meetings each spring to focus intensively on what they were seeing and learning.

Students and staff usually participate in the National Shakespeare Institute for three or four years; this study captured a two-year slice of this cycle. A set of questions was developed around authenticity, academic rigor, applied learning, active exploration, adult relationships, and assessment practices. Numerous quotes from students and teachers in response to these questions are included in this study as evidence of the impacts and success of the program. The methods could best be described as lying in the regions of ethnography and case study. The most important methodological ingredients were up-close interactions and observations, and sustained involvement during two seasons of paired summer and fall sessions.

The scholars focused on learning in four fields—the language itself, acting, working in creative communities, and learning about oneself and linking that to social and intellectual development.—J.C.

RESULTS

The researchers found much to like in their assessments of the impact of these programs on their participants.

1. Participants engage in Shakespeare's plays in ways that respect (rather than short-circuit) the complexity of the plays; it is precisely this respect for complexity that engages these learners.
2. Once engaged and with adequate support, guidance, and resources, participants do embrace and meet the challenges that had seemed difficult or overwhelming (and that often steer readers and theater-goers alike away from Shakespeare).
3. The Shakespeare & Company programs created caring and creative communities; caring and creativity seem explicitly linked to each other and to the development of deep understandings.
4. Feelings and emotions are linked to achieving deep understandings of Shakespeare's plays and are often a critical entry point to engagement with the plays.
5. Teachers made transitions from didactic teaching styles to "teacher as player" and "teacher as facilitator or catalyst" during this program; these transitions were experienced as transformative and profound by both teachers and students.
6. Participants gained information and skills: studying Shakespeare and his language, approaching dramatic action, acting, working with others, and seeing themselves as learners.
7. Playfulness and seriousness do not conflict with each other in the Institute and Fall Festival learning environments.
8. The highest levels of professional training are wholly consistent with the principles, structures, and pedagogy of these programs. The report also suggests ingredients desirable for replication of such a program in other locales: (a) a supportive local agency such as a theater company or school, (b) an adequate pool of artists and educators inclined to do this work, (c) a community interested in the arts, (d) financial support, and (e) ongoing conversations among the players to negotiate commitment to such a program.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study supports a growing body of research showing that dramatic study and enactment can produce a rich learning environment. This work shows that Shakespeare's plays can be particularly effective because of their life-like complexity (that is, when care, patience, and skill interact to invite participants to engage such complexity). The complexity of issues and emotions in the plays promotes word-by-word, emotion-by-emotion, thought-by-thought investigation of meaning. This step-by-step approach invites those who study Shakespeare to go deeply into their own experience, a process that is linked to all types of learning.

This study does not just document the impacts of Shakespeare & Company's summer teacher training and fall student productions on the understanding and interpretation of Shakespeare's plays, or on acting and stage direction skills. The study illustrates a whole approach to teaching and learning, including assumptions about teachers and teaching and learners and learning, that has implications across a wide spectrum of educational situations. The implications concern not only what is taught and learned but also who we are as teachers and learners,—J.C.

COMMENTARY

This study is not standard issue from education journals. It is a long-term study examining two seasons of summer teacher development and fall play production in 10 schools. Shakespeare & Company offers much more than many research studies can get their arms around, overcoming many common challenges—including those of time, resources, or the rigors of conceptual creativity and clarity needed for a study like this.

We should wish this sort of program on all teachers and students willing to engage this work. It may seem to readers that this program lies in a dream world where teachers can spend a full month in the summer with a professional company, and work intensively with groups of engaged students during the following fall. But the prospects for replication at a meaningful level may be better than they first appear. The crux of the challenge is the first-rate training of teachers. This study provides a sense of what is required for this.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study provides an example of how an arts organization can work with schools to extend the traditional curriculum. Specifically, the program provides a model of how arts-based, project-based learning can assist students in developing higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills.—C.G.-P.

COMMENTARY

"Unfolding" is used to describe how students open themselves to learning processes through the study of Shakespeare: acting, working in creative communities, and linking self-knowledge to social and intellectual development.— C.G.-P.

METHODS

The authors selected nine schools for this study to represent city, suburban, and rural areas, different socio-economic backgrounds, and varied organizational contexts (public and private schools in Tasmania). Eleven classes of fifth- and sixth-graders were included in the study on the basis of teacher interest. Even though some teachers had no previous classroom drama experience, they still self-selected to participate in the study. The teachers had continuous access to speech and drama coaches, whom they worked with at the outset of the program and called in from time to time.

After a two-day initial workshop, the teachers were invited to engage children in dramatic activities of their own design; there was no standardization of length of sessions, frequency of drama activities in the classrooms, or continuity of themes. The amount of data collected implies that most or all participating teachers became actively involved in the use of drama over the school year. The one restriction placed on the teachers and students was that they had to use "imaginary" drama, and not work from written texts. This model reinforced the project's interest in "expressive" language, as opposed to decoding text. As the authors describe the design of the study, "Within this frame of reference the children and the teacher can explore relationships, attitudes and values in a vivid and immediate way…attitudes, relationships and significant moments are explored from 'the inside' rather than through discussion alone."

After permitting teacher experimentation and trials curing the first three months, researchers spent two school terms documenting dramatic activities in all of the classrooms by audio taping every session in all participating classrooms. Teachers were instructed to gather samples of language and verbal exchanges from all of the children, with even attention to each child in the classroom over time. From all transcripts, a total of 280 language samples containing drama in action, planning discussion, and post-improvisation reflection were obtained—representing all classrooms evenly for each type of language sample.

The researchers analyzed the resulting "word samples" using formal criteria for classifying and describing the children's use of language. The main classifications of interest concerned the predominant purpose of the sampled language: expressive, interactional, or informational. Expressive language reflects the speaker's individual thoughts, feelings, ideas, and personal viewpoint. Interactional language reflects a speaker's focus on the person(s) being addressed through attempts to persuade, control, or command. And informational language involves the speaker's focus on neither him/herself nor the listener, but is concerned with giving information.—J.C.

RESULTS

The author claims that language use in imaginary drama exercises not only differs from language use in regular classrooms but also encourages desirable types of thinking and cognitive development. The reasons are the observed characteristics of language in drama: speculation, reflection, explanation, and evaluation. The author considers the overriding difference between children's language in normal classroom activities and language in their dramatic work is that regular classroom language is overwhelmingly informational; in contrast, the language of imaginary drama is only half informational, and half expressive and interactional. (The author provides no confirming data on the purposes of regular classroom language, but a predominance of informational purpose seems plausible).

Drama provides opportunities for children to use language for a wider variety of purposes than otherwise typically occurs in classrooms. Drama provides an opportunity to develop expressive language, which, as heard in the reflections segments, helps uncover feelings as well as develop opinions and thoughts. The authors found that drama encourages critical child-to-child exchanges and reflection on social interactions. The reflection phase had tendencies to bring up issues related to moral values in the otherwise information-based curriculum. As the authors maintain, Drama puts back the human content into what is predominantly a materialistic curriculum."

The recorded reflection sessions also suggest that children in this study grew to. recognize drama as a powerful learning medium— and language as a tool for learning and growth.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study contributes to our understanding of the impact of drama on language through its findings: mainly that drama encourages expressive and interactional language, as opposed to informational language, which, according to the author, dominates regular classroom life. The study's typology of language is one we do not see in other drama studies, although the scheme makes intuitive sense and seems valuable. This study is also the only one included in this Compendium that identified drama as a catalyst for discussions of moral values.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

This powerful study explores what happens when children engage in dramatization regularly over one full school year. Two hundred eighty students in nine different schools participated. As an experiment in drama and language, the program benefited from the participation of drama and speech specialists who worked with the classroom teachers to plan the drama activities.

One feature of the design might be seen as a weakness or strength. Dramatic activities were improvisational; they involved no writing or script and in some places involved the teacher in role, in other places not. This lack of standardization seems at first unorthodox, but in fact plays well to the goals of the research. The author wished to capture the language of improvisational drama across the many forms it might take; and she orchestrated enough settings to assure a considerable variety of dramatic situations.

The emergence of moral value discussions in follow-up discussions of the improvisational drama activities, unique to this study among those included in the Compendium, may be related to the fact that the subjects of this study were fifth and sixth-graders. A majority of drama and learning studies involve younger primary school children who may be less likely to engage in moral debates of any complexity.

While this study exposes the tendencies of children to engage in discussion about human interaction and moral values during post-improvisation discussions, it does not in fact measure learning in these domains. But discussion and reflection in all likelihood represent a start on learning as well as a potentially powerful opportunity for leaming.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

The significance of this study is its discovery that drama can be taught in two distinct modes, experiential, which focuses on attempting to live through some aspect of an experience, and presentational, which focuses on communicating something to an audience outside the classroom. By identifying these two discrete approaches, the study points to the need for further research into benefits or implications of each approach.—C.G.-P.

COMMENTARY

The study suggests that drama can positively contribute to children's language development. In particular, drama can impact students who have primarily been exposed to informational (lower-order thinking skills) language focused on transmitting facts and information. Drama can influence language development by using expressive language to provide students with opportunities to speculate, imagine, predict, reason, and evaluate their own learning (higher-order thinking skills).—C.G.-P.

METHODS

The study involved 84 fourth-graders and 70 eighth-graders in a middle-class, suburban public school district, randomized into three groups. One group at each grade level engaged in role-playing as guided by a facilitator, a second group received instruction in persuasive writing, and the third group received no specific instruction. The researcher facilitated the role-play sessions and also provided the writing groups their persuasive writing instruction.

The researcher had the role-play groups (one at grade four and one at grade eight) enact three different situations in which they were trying to persuade the school principal to: (1) have a regular school party: (2) let students decide all of what they would study; and (3) make a change in the school cafeteria. The students in the role-play groups paired up and took turns as persuader and listener over 35 minutes for each of the three issues. All pairs in the grade-level experimental group role-played at the same time, and each pairs conversation was audiotaped. After a role-play, each student wrote a letter intended to persuade the real school principal about the issue the group had enacted. In parallel fashion, the students in the two instruction groups received 35 minutes of instructionin persuasive writing before each of the three writing exercises. All six intervention and writing episodes across the two grade levels took place over a span of five weeks. Data for the study came from the written letters and also from tape recordings of the student role-playing activities, A third group received no instruction.—J.C.

RESULTS

The core finding of this work is that role-playing in partners is more effective than a lecture with examples when it comes to impacting persuasive letter writing. Finer but interesting points in the results differed at the two grade levels. For fourth-graders, role-playing is significantly more effective than either instruction or no treatment at all. For eighth-graders, role-playing is more effective than no treatment in inspiring persuasive writing. Role-playing also scores higher than direct instruction for eighth-graders, but the difference is not statistically significant. Fourth-graders who received direct instruction in this experiment actually performed worse than the students who received no instruction.

When comparing the role-playing sessions with student writing, both eighth- and especially fourth-graders produced more persuasive assertions orally than in written form. And in an interesting twist, fourth-graders remember and use their role-playing partners' persuasive assertions in their written letters more than twice as often as their own persuasive assertions made during role-playing.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study provides evidence of the value of role-playing as a pre-writing activity. In addition to the finding itself, this study contributes through its focus on writing skills as an outcome of dramatic activity, a topic little touched in this Compendium.

The effect of role-playing on persuasive writing (as opposed to that of direct instruction or no treatment) is found to be stronger for fourth-graders than for eighth-graders (where the effect is nonetheless positive). This conclusion fits a larger pattern of results in the Compendium, where the effects of dramatic enactment are greater for younger subjects just about wherever age is tested as a factor.

And another result teased out by Wagner's work might stir some interest in yet another little-researched subject within drama and education—namely, the impacts of listening to fellow role-players in a dramatic situation. After students tried to be persuasive to an assigned role-playing partner, they tended to use their partner's arguments in subsequent writing more frequently than their own arguments.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

This study presents important findings regarding the value of role-playing as a pre-writing activity in the classroom and suggests that in addition to addressing the qualities of good writing directly, a teacher should take advantage of verbal role-playing activities in building writing skills.

This study lays the groundwork for further work on the relationship between oral and written skills. The study looks at the impact of role-playing on a specific type of writing only. Further research could examine whether extended training in role-playing could help students to build writing skills that are retained and transferable to other types of writing not the subject of this research.

The observation that role-playing in this study had more impact on the observer (the receiver of a persuasive statement during role-play) than on the direct actor (the student making a persuasive statement during role-play) signals an under-researched issue in this Compendium. Most of the studies we discuss concern the effects of dramatic action (particularly role-playing of one sort or another) directly on the actor, Wagner is interested in such main effects, to be sure, but the observation of effects on listeners evokes a relatively untapped but potentially vast area of formal inquiry by educational or developmental researchers. This is the impact of dramatization or theatrical presentation on audiences.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

The methods used by the author might be adapted by arts researchers attempting to do careful studies of the effects of arts instruction or arts skills on student performance in another subject area, even the one chosen by the author— persuasive writing. There is benefit in reading how other fields develop studies, how controls are established across complex variables, and how student products might be coded and analyzed. Studies in arts education would benefit from the same kind of care that this author takes. However, the actual conduct of this research and its results are not directly related to the arts, though in the operational definition of the author, "role-playing" is the same thing as "drama."—T.B.

COMMENTARY

Role-playing is a tool derived from interpersonal communication practice and is closer to "simulation" than dramatic art. The author describes those aspects of role-playing that are closest to art—pretense, lack of verisimilitude—as detracting variables in the students' efforts to create persuasive written communications, and her effort is to remove them by making the simulation as realistic as possible. At the same time, "persuasive writing," as it is used by the author, is closer to rhetorical and political writing than to writing as art. The author, in fact, contrasts it with "expressive" writing.—T.B.

METHODS

This study enlisted 120 randomly chosen children in six kindergarten classrooms, stratified for gender balance. As part of the selection process, children were randomly assigned to 30 groups of four Thus each classroom provided five groups for the study. Each group heard, discussed, and re-enacted two familiar tales on days 1 and 2, and an unfamiliar tale on day 3. The children were videotaped during their dramatizations so that the researchers could categorize and analyze children's behaviors during re-enactment. The first two re-enactments were done to help build reliable measures of children's actions within fantasy play—such as "metaplay"—which could prove important to the research.

The third day's activities constituted one experimental test. After this day's story re-enactment, the children were tested for three achievements: recall of that day's story content using a criterion-referenced test; story recall, using story telling; and story sequencing, using a picture arranging task. The storytelling assessment instrument also provided a measure of oral language competence of the subjects. (Recall that one aim of the analysis was understanding the influences of factors within dramatic enactment on story comprehension; thus all subjects used dramatic enactment on day 3).

Another comparison condition was established on the fourth day, when the children were read an unfamiliar story that they did not subsequently re-enact. They were tested using the same measures as applied on the third day. In addition, six days following the final story dramatizations, the children were tested again for story recall, story sequencing, and the use of productive language—both for their enacted story (day 3) and for their "heard" story (day 4). (A small bias favoring recall of the "heard" story seemed present in this design, since its recall was measured after five instead of six days). The analysis used data from these measures to assess if types of play within story enactment contributed to sustained recall, first regarding the enacted story and second, to recall of the "heard" story. The researchers focused particularly on instances of children's stepping out of role to ask questions or to direct other players. They refer to this as "metaplay," which generally indicates active concern about the progress of the re-enactment fueled by higher-order thinking about what's going on. The analysis also observed additional characteristics of behavior during the fantasy play sessions (such as the use of nonverbal skills and social problem-solving).

The authors used regression analyses to test for significant contributions of within-dramatization factors to story comprehension skills. This is an important feature of the Study, because regression allows for assessment of the independent contributions of different factors to specific outcomes. The study explored differentiating aspects of child behavior during dramatization that might contribute relatively more or less to story comprehension. The authors included measures of productive (oral) language ability obtained when children re-told stories. These measures provided indicators of existing verbal ability differences among the subjects and thus comprise an important control variable.—J.C.

RESULTS

This study shows that acts of directing by young players (or metaplay) during re-enactment and productive language capacity of children make substantial independent contributions to story comprehension independent of differences in verbal ability. This result holds for both the immediate-recall tasks and for the delayed-recall tasks. In comparison, play or dramatization itself (in contrast to the no-dramatization condition of day 4) contributed relatively little to story comprehension. Children's play direction behavior contributed four times the predictive power for reading comprehension of enactment versus no enactment. It thus appears that the meta-behaviors of stepping out of role, thinking about, and questioning or attempting to direct players are associated with higher levels of story understanding.

Through controlling for verbal ability, the authors observe that metaplay is not simply evidence of verbal achievement—in addition to their dispositions to "direct," children in metaplay show more social skills and social problem-solving ability than children not engaging in metaplay.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study makes a strong contribution to the understanding of how engagement in dramatic activities can improve story comprehension for kindergartners. The study specifically examines fantasy play and finds that "metaplay," a key element of fantasy play, seems to have an especially strong and positive impact on children's story comprehension. "Metaplay," as suggested by the study's title, refers to instances where children go beyond simply acting out a fantasy play and step out of a role to act as the play's director or to raise questions about the play. This study finds that the effect of metaplay is stronger than the act of dramatization versus no dramatization.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

This study serves to accentuate a component of Jennifer Ross Goodman's 1990 study of fantasy play and literacy development (also summarized in this Compendium). Both studies present very rigorous designs, among the strongest reported in the drama research summarized in this Compendium. Beth look within dramatic play to find specific elements that influence verbal-related skills, rather than using dramatic play as a whole as a lone predictor of child development. More specifically, this study finds that stepping out of role to offer verbal or nonverbal direction associates with increased understanding and sustained recall. Another important observation in this study is that effects on story recall were measured while controlling for the subjects' general oral language skills. This is one of few studies in drama using multiple regression analysis to provide controls within its analytical framework.

One implication of this study extends across the literature generally investigating classroom drama and reading comprehension. This is that drama-involved groups usually outperform non-drama groups. An open question remains based on this study: to what degree is the advantage assigned to drama groups carried by their members who engage in meta-cognitive activities (such as stepping out of role to "work on" a dramatic production}? This study provides a suggestion that drama alone versus no drama is not a large contributor to developmental advances; gains go to the more thoughtful and critical members of the cast.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

Building on a rich research tradition that shows that thematic-fantasy play improves comprehension as well as other cognitive abilities, this study breaks new ground. For the first time we have evidence that it is metaplay (or directing peers in the acting out of the story) that is critical in comprehension. Williamson and Silvern wisely conclude that it may well be the better comprehension that accounts for the metaplay rather than the other way around, but because the two go together, metaplay needs to be fostered and valued in early childhood programs.—B.J.W.

COMMENTARY

The findings of this study make a good case for giving children ample opportunities to design for themselves ways to act out stories they hear. As they direct their peers, they will be demonstrating or improving their comprehension of the stories in a way that is natural and enjoyable for them. Children who act out a story together without teacher tuition take charge of their own learning, and find the interpersonal and cognitive challenges engaging.

In light of the current pressures on preschool and kindergarten teachers to teach children to read at younger and younger ages, these findings provide an antidote to the pervasive and misguided emphasis on teacher-directed drill on lower-level skills of reading in preschool and kindergarten. Such an emphasis may result in better scores on standardized decoding tests, but in the long run the children may well be victims of the so-called third-grade slump in reading comprehension that characterizes far too many children. Children who engage in thematic-fantasy play in relation to stories, including those that represent their own ethnic or cultural heritage, are learning to pay attention to what matters most in reading—comprehension.

This study also has implications for children's writing skills. Much of recent research on the acquisition of writing skill has focused on the role of peer interactions and role-playing. Children who write with engagement and energy are usually talking with their peers and shaping their stories to entertain them (similar behaviors to those exhibited during fantasy play), and children who have opportunities to act out the stories they write (as they do through thematic-fantasy play) increase their enthusiasm for writing. Writing demands other qualities that are similar to those required for thematic-fantasy play, for example, constant shifting from high-level decisions to low-level mechanics! concerns. In writing, children must "shift" between decisions regarding the overall gist of what a piece of writing is about to lower-level concerns such as spelling, or, in the case of very young children, even the formation of the letters themselves. In thematic-fantasy play, children must shift from high-level decisions as to who could play the grandmother back to the low-level miming of picking a flower.

Williamson and Silvern were appropriately cautious in their interpretation of their study and have suggested ways further studies can be designed to explore causality between metaplay, comprehension, and IQ. It would be appropriate to embed this study in vygotsky's concept of a zone of proximal development (ZPD). He implies that what Williamson and Silvern call thematic-fantasy play provides a ZPD because of the process of symbolization. To effectively use symbols, a person must be able not only to know that this object is a purse, but for his or her purposes now it is Little Red Riding Hood's basket. In other words it is both the thing itself and what it symbolizes. The child who can explicate this distinction is in a ZPD where objects can be assigned an arbitrary function, just as a reader eventually has to learn to assign a particular squiggle on a page to a speech sound. Children who comprehend stories have to know simultaneously that their caregiver who is reading the harsh "All the better to eat you with, my Dear" is not about to devour them, but, rather, is choosing to play the role as a wolf in order to heighten the pleasure of the story. Expressive oral reading has this in common with thematic-fantasy play, A child can remain a trustworthy friend to his peers and also become a big bad wolf in a drama.—B.J.W.

METHODS

The subjects of this study are 17 children labeled "at risk" in a remedial third- and fourth-grade classroom. The class included children reading below grade level and children with special needs who until recent policy changes would have most likely been schooled in special education classrooms. Eleven of the 17 children had been retained at some point in their short school careers. The children experienced traditional round-robin reading instruction up to the time of the study. During the one year over which this study took place, the teacher and students transformed their reading program from one that used "traditional" instruction to one in which they worked mainly through classroom theater activities, under the guidance of a visiting expert (not the researcher). The theater instructor worked with the class once s week from mid- December through April. The class was exposed to multicultural trade books, dramatic expression based on these books, and literary discussion. Instead of traditional cycles of reading, hearing others read, minimal discussing, and reading some more, students began to approach their texts through interpretation aimed at performing narratives and excerpts from their readings. The researcher used participant observation, audio recording, and video recording to discern various qualities of classroom life during reading instruction. Particular attention was given to language and action that characterize (1) instructional practice, (2) children's approaches to reading, (3) children's attitudes about reading, and (4) the degree to which children create meaning from text.—J.C.

RESULTS

By the start of the year, the children in this classroom had experienced enough signals that they were special to realize that their specialness was not necessarily a good thing. They had received a variety of "injuries" due to poor reading, labeling, and lack of success in most school activities. The teacher's remediating approach to reading instruction served to further narrow children's opinions of reading and themselves as readers and only increased their dependency on their teacher for anything having to do with residing, including picking up a book. Through classroom theater, however, new reading resources became available to these children, especially peer discussions in which they could argue and negotiate meanings of texts. Amidst the challenge to dramatize, "…children called on background knowledge, blending their understandings into others (sic). They became decision-makers and experts as they interpreted the words and did not simply turn the pages…. Through increased opportunities for practice, the children not only got inside the text but improved their accuracy and momentum." Children expanded their understandings and explored alternative expressions; they began to see themselves as actors, as expresses, and for the first time, the author concludes, as readers.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study offers the field an example of a thoughtful, patient, and long-term inquiry into the life of a classroom over an entire school year. Instead of the more familiar use of treatment and control groups and a one-week research experiment to discern effects, the author in this case participates and observes in a classroom twice per week. A special quality of the resulting report is the very explicit account of how the author grapples with making valid sense of the voluminous notes and hundreds of hours of taped classroom language generated in the study. The sense-making is ably informed by the works of world-leading ethnographers, including Fred Erickson.

The results of this study should also be considered contributions to what we know about drama's roles in academic and social development The classroom theater transformed students. At first they believed reading was a matter of just decoding story after story. When using classroom theater as a routine in their reading instruction, students took great interest in stories and displayed heightened inclinations to read for meaning and increased interest in the expression and movement involved in stories.—J.C.

COMMENTARY

This study demonstrates the value of what the author calls a "design experiment," one in which the evolution of events in a real classroom engaged in a new instructional model led to the sort of insights we might call "professional knowledge" as much as "research knowledge." However the products of such work might be characterized, the sense the author makes of this experiment should interest researchers, theater specialists, and teachers alike. The value of this work results from the tenacity and perspicacious orientation of the author to "see" what takes place before, during, and after the 10 weeks of in-class drama coaching by an expert. There is rich detail in the reporting, much reproduction of children's dialogue, and a very convincing argument that one can learn valuable things by watching classroom events.

At its center, this study has parallels with Seidel's evaluation of Shakespeare & Company's education program. In that study adolescents taking time and patience to unpack the complexity and richness of the language in a play come to see themselves as a different sort of learner—deeper and more accomplished. An analogous shift in self-perception and sense of achievement visited the much younger academically challenged children in this study.—J.C.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

COMMENTARY

The major part of the study focuses on the teacher's reading strategies and the students' responses to them, and beams a spotlight on the contrast the children sensed in their characterizations of reading vs. acting. The children's understanding of acting encompassed expressive intonation in oral reading, an ability every good reading teacher has as a goal. Because Wolf chose to do an in-depth qualitative "design experiment," she was able to capture a thick description of what was going on in the children's understandings and attitudes; her method of inquiry served her well.

The teacher Wolf chose to study was one who believed in and was dedicated to the now widely discredited (as Wolf admits) "round-robin" reading for remedial readers. This teaching method created an extremely sharp contrast between what the children deemed reading, and the reader response and interpretation that the theater teacher introduced. Admittedly, the views of the teacher Wolf studied may be more characteristic of teachers of remedial students than teachers of other students, and, if so, this is a sad commentary on the status of reading instruction in remedial settings. What is needed from future research are studies that compare good psychollinguistically sound reading instruction with theater strategies (unlike this one, which is compromised because it seems to contrast bad reading instruction with good theater techniques). Such a focus might tease out a distinction between reading and theater instruction that are both aimed at some of the same goals, such as fluency, expressive oral interpretation, connecting new with prior knowledge, insight into character values and motives, and reader response. The contrast would probably not be as stark as was found in this study, but such research might show just what it is that theater can do that other instruction that aims at the same understanding by the students does not do. It is not dear in this study whether the reading teacher ever whole-heartedly embraced goals beyond accurate decoding despite her obvious enthusiasm for the theater project and her increase in wait time before supplying words. By the end of the year, her major goal narrowed to preparation for the test battery. Hence, the metaphor of flying, but only for a short time, was apt.

Educational policy-makers can use this study to show the value of classroom theater in facilitating an understanding and interpretation of literature that is deep and long lasting. Wolf's findings provide a persuasive warrant for the advocacy of more classroom theater and financial support for training programs and positions in schools for theater experts.—B.J.W.

Essay;

Research on Drama and Theater in Education

James S. Catterall

Dorothy Heathcote, 1975¹

Introduction

About 40 years ago, a current surfaced in professional education writing and instructional practice reflecting a new legitimacy of drama and theater in the education of children. We may persist in debating what we want our children to know and be able to do; but when all is said and done, education is at least about preparation for effective living. In this context, and reflected in the writings of the world's pre-eminent classroom drama expert sampled above, we can readily see why some teachers would include dramatic activities in their instructional repertoires. Dramatic conventions offer a safe harbor for trying out the situations of life; for experimenting with expression and communication; and for deepening human understanding—developments devoutly to be desired, all.

Thinking and writing about drama in education in the middle of the 20^th century did not involve much professional social inquiry—or research. Rather the deep experiences and up-close observations of teachers and coaches in the schools as well as the trainers of teachers engendered a broad consensus that drama can teach. Professional discourse began with such an assumption, and the concerns and divisions among the leading educationists focused not so much on the "whys" of drama in the curriculum but on the "hows." This conversation radiated at its brightest from the United Kingdom, where drama became widely used in the elementary schools as well as a course in the preparation of teachers.²

The presence of drama in American schools rests on informal traditions and is dictated largely by individual teacher preferences for engaging the medium. The range is wide—from U.S. teachers making pilgrimages to study with Dorothy Heathcote, to the lone teacher spontaneously organizing a role-playing exercise at the pop of an inspiration, and to entire teaching staffs in schools working in substantial partnerships with local theater companies. The common ingredient is that teachers use drama in their classrooms when they believe it accomplishes something.

The purpose of this Compendium is to report on the nature and extent of our knowledge about that "accomplished something," The lens we have chosen is the lens of scholarly research. This is not because we believe that the only things we can claim to truly "know" come to us through the efforts of formal research. Rather, we seek to check the "knowledge" of experience and intuition with that of more formal processes that examine the effects on human development of drama and theater in educational settings.

¹Dorothy Heathcote. Drama and learning, Chapter in Liz Johnson and Cecily O'Neill (Eds.) Dorothy Heathcote, Collected Writings on Education and Drama. Cheltenham, England: Stanley Thornes (Publishers] Ltd. Page 90. (19B4). This essay was originally published in 1975.

Definitions of Drama

Drama and theater in education are carried out in many formats, with many purposes, and in the guise of wide-ranging terminology. A unifying characteristic is the adoption of character roles of one sort or another by learners. Many studies included in the Compendium involve portraying a character from children's literature; some roles emerge from pure fantasy at the prompting of a teacher or coach. Most studies involve groups of children enacting scenarios or complete stories, sometimes with advance planning and sometimes not. These characterizations begin to hint at the general focus across the studies we chose for inclusion—research on drama in education concentrates mainly on young elementary-and kindergerten-age children, an observation to which we return when discussing specific research results.

Research studies do not exhibit much in the way of a standardized vocabulary when they come to identifying dramatic activities. The studies included in the Compendium are no exception and display a diverse array of terms:

Classroom drama. This term refers to the use of drama in the school classroom. Such activity is typically directed by the classroom teacher or by students themselves and sometimes engages the assistance or direction of a drama specialist, sometimes the researcher.

Creative drama. This term refers primarily to improvisations I activities in which the participants invent fictional situations and characters of their own choosing, with or without specific guidance or context-setting by teachers or coaches. "Creative" refers to the inventiveness children bring to the dramatic act, orchestrated or spontaneous. A word of caution: improvising may smack of chaos in the canons of cognitive research. But as a process of invention and expression, improvisation proves of great interest to scholars of language development and reading, and with good reason, on the basis of what we report here.

Fantasy play. "Fantasy play" situations involve very young children (e.g., 5-year-olds) who tend to bring a great deal of inventiveness to the portrayal of even the most tried and true children's stories and characters.

Thematic fantasy play. "Thematic fantasy play" is dramatization guided by a theme or themes.

Is this art?

Given the description of the "field" offered and implied just above, it may be worth pausing before going forward to visit and dispense with this awesome question. As the details of the Compendium's studies in drama unfold, it is reasonable to ask what the fantasy role-playing of a 5-year-old or the classroom enactment of "Rumpelstiltskin" has to do with "art." We face the same issue raised by both Terry Baker and Karen Bradley in their overviews of studies in the visual arts and dance for this Compendium. Baker, for example, asks what elements of educational activity are to be considered an instance of the visual arts. We too faced challenges in deciding what to include as a study in the dramatic or theater arts.

We found no explicit conception of drama as an art form in the research studies we surveyed or in the studies we summarize here. And we found no empirical research into the academic and social effects of what was termed or even might be called the theater arts of any sort. This means that a great many things potentially relevant to a discussion of the academic and social effects of drama and theater do not enter the present conversation, especially things having to do with formal theatrical production and performance. Our focus necessarily became foundational. We indicated above that role-playing was the common ingredient of the studies we included in the Compendium. This flowed from our main criterion in selecting studies for the drama section: we chose studies where individuals adopt "roles" for one reason or another—characters other than themselves. The characters may be fictional or real, present time or historical, planned or improvised. The rationale for our main selection was that role-playing lies at the heart of the dramatic form, however infantile its execution and regardless of where baby steps might lead from an artistic point of view.

What did we find?

Here we turn to several characterizations of the studies we include in the Compendium. We first describe the targets and designs of the studies. Then we describe the main findings of the research.

Who is studied? Among our drama studies, there is s large concentration of research focused on young children. More than half of the drama studies included in the Compendium involve children between preschool and fourth grade as subjects, and a third of the studies focus on children in first grade and earlier. Only three studies involve middle schoolers, and three involved high school students.

² In the presence of such convictions, we might ask why elementary schools and not all schools? The of scholarly writing about classroom drama concerns young children. We see scarce reference to the use of classroom drama in secondary school classrooms, perhaps because disciplinary specialist teachers see little place for drama in their instructional . While drama's detachment from high school physics right be expected, it potential use in studies of literature and history seems evident on the basic of research with young children, if not self-evident. A tradition of theatre in education (TIE) much involved with secondary schools in the UK is the subject of much writing but has produced no empirical research that we could find.

Study designs. Nearly half of our studies are true experiments, which use random assignment of subjects to experimental and control groups. Most others construct comparison groups in rigorous ways. None depend solely on pre- and post-measures, although these are included among the data collection activities of some studies. Studies in drama and learning, like many studies published in developmental psychology, tend to be of short duration. About a third of our studies were conducted over a matter of days. About half involved experiments or interventions lasting a few weeks or less. Three of our studies lasted a full school year, and one spanned two school years. This distribution reflects the field of experimental research in child development. Long studies are expensive, extended classroom studies may tax the patience of regular teachers, and children leave their initial schools and in doing so deplete experimental and control groups. And the academic context of the work of researchers again constrains the field: researchers publish more frequently when their projects occupy shorter periods of time. This is generally unfortunate, because there is good reason to value investigations of long-term programs because of their potentially deeper impacts and longer-lasting effects.

Focus on narrative understanding. The Compendium's studies point to scholarly interest in a rather narrow cluster of academic domains in which drama shows consistent positive impacts. Although the dramatic or role-playing activities and the designs of experiments vary considerably, the effects gauged in a strong majority of our studies lie in the area of narrative understanding. Research shows consistent positive associations between dramatic enactment and reading comprehension, oral story understanding, and written story understanding. Research on the youngest subjects, 5-year-olds, kindergartners, and first-graders attends almost exclusively to story understanding. Having enacted a story (as opposed to having the story read to them in many designs), children are better able to retell the story, to recall more details, and to put the story's elements in the correct sequence. Studies of older children show impacts of drama on reading skills, persuasive writing ability, narrative writing skills, and children's self- conceptions as learners and readers.

The younger the better? Several studies teased out an important phenomenon within the range of impacts of drama on young children. In the four studies testing for effects across age groups, the impacts of role-playing were consistently stronger for the younger or youngest participants. Effects for kindergartners and first-graders exceeded effects on second- and third-graders; and in one study (Wagner), effects of enacting stories on writing for fourth-graders were larger than effects for eighth-graders.

This observation might help to explain the concentration on young children as subjects in published drama studies. If dramatic enactment has its most profound effects on younger children, this is where studies will find effects and attain publication. And this will reinforce a focus on younger children by other scholars who tend to build on each other's work rather than push into unestablished territory.

Why such concentration on reading and language? We might expect studies of drama to be drawn to reading and story domains because dramatic activity has substantial traffic with the spoken and written word, and dramatic acts almost by definition involve "narrative" or story—"movement in time," as Heathcote likes to say. But more is probably involved. Reading and language development (along with mathematics) are the coin of the realm in the educational research community. Because they are considered most central, academic journals and book editors no doubt favor research in reading and verbal expression—and of course researchers must publish in these outlets. Another influence lies on the technical side of the education research business: reading and language development benefit from established instrumentation for measuring results.

"Straying" into research on social developments such as empathy and tolerance or self-conception as examples of touted benefits of engaging in drama generally requires the invention of custom measures, observations requiring judgments and inferences on the part of researchers, or the much-criticized use of self-reports. As a group, these measures are "softer" than test scores, and scholars using them must go to extra lengths to demonstrate the validity of their measures—as some Compendium authors manage to do. In our studies, inquiries into social development are often supplements to studies of reading and language.

Social development. Drama is typically a social, interpersonal event. But research has given comparatively little attention to potential social developments. Among our studies there are some exceptions: de la Cruz finds enhanced social development among special education children including generally courteous behavior, ignoring distractions, and acceptable use of free time. Fink's extensive study suggests that drama activities for kindergartners lead to development of what he calls "social perspectivism,"—the ability to comprehend the various social relations inherent in a situation involving a cluster of individuals. In another study (one of only three high school studies we include), Horn explores self-confidence and self-image among at-risk secondary students who became engaged in playwriting. And Schaffner shows evidence of lasting attention to moral dilemmas as a result of drama.

Another of our studies should be considered especially strong with respect to its reach into the complex worlds of academic, emotional, and social development. This is Seidel's assessment of the programs of Shakespeare & Company carried out between 1996 and 1998. This work is strong because it investigated a high-quality and extended program and because of its intensive methods of documenting the program's functioning and impacts. This study shows that Shakespeare's plays can be particularly effective because of their lifelike complexity. The complexity of issues and emotions in the plays promotes, "word-by-word, emotion-by-emotion, thought-by-thought investigation of meaning," at least when teachers and learners choose to devote time to such an approach and to these ends. The step-by-step approach of Shakespeare & Company invites those who study Shakespeare to go deeply into their own experience, which is linked directly to all types of learning.

Seidel's study documents the impacts of Shakespeare & Company's summer teacher training and fall student productions not only on the understanding and interpretation of Shakespeare's plays but also on acting and stage direction skills. The study illustrates a whole approach to teaching and learning that has implications across a wide spectrum of educational situations.

Unpacking drama

Research in drama, like research in most types of interventions, often simply compares drama-involved groups to non-involved groups. We see this in many studies included here. Our studies also show that qualities within or accompanying dramatic activity are important contributors to the effectiveness of role-playing. One such factor comprises various acts of getting out of role to direct, suggest, and/or discuss aspects of what is transpiring during a dramatic portrayal. Directing and suggesting during rehearsal or performance are indicative of meta-cognitive activities and are evidence of engagement and concentrated thought. Whatever effects a study measures are usually more pronounced for children expressing active concern for how things are going. Another productive activity surrounding dramatic enactment shown in one study (Schaffner) is the value of formal reflection by participants after a dramatic enactment In the case of this study, de-briefing and discussion drew children into explorations of interpersonal relations and moral values in what they had just performed.

Podlozny's meta-analytic review also identified studies in which the influence of elements within the classroom influenced results for participants. Her analyses indicate that using a structured plot contributes to story understanding, reading achievement, and writing achievement She found leadership, in contrast to the few studies included here, to have influence in some domains and not in others. She found leadership to impact oral and written measures of story understanding, but not to affect general reading and writing achievement, interestingly, the meta-analysis indicates that dramatic activities using a mix of structured and non-structured plots produce the largest effects on oral language development. We conclude generally that awareness and promotion of specific child behaviors within drama, such as critical thought, questioning, opportunities for direction, and formal reflection, may be important to consider when designing dramatic enactment programs.

Transfer

Transfer refers to learning in one situation and context that produces capabilities and dispositions or inclinations producing effective performance in a different situation and context. Transfer is a central question explored across this Compendium, not just in the drama section. Does learning in art engender skills or dispositions, which in turn enhance academic or social development? We approach the larger questions regarding the transfer embedded across the entire Compendium in a separate essay within this volume.

Four of our studies show some evidence of transfer from drama activities. DuPont found that comprehension of text promoted in drama contributes to comprehension of text generally. Fink found that using imaginative play in facilitated experimental conditions associates with generally higher imaginative play subsequently. Horn finds that the writing involved in a drama experiment with struggling high schoolers cultivated general habits of mind during the year the class spent conceiving, writing, and producing a play. The disposition cultivated in this case was the general habit of seeking additional resources in order to write more effectively (specifically, using school and public libraries; turning to peers). This habit of mind is in short supply across student populations from grade 1 through graduate school, by all known assessments.

What is overlooked in available drama studies?

Since the discussion above indicates that the studies included in this Compendium tend to a relatively narrow focus and cluster at the early elementary level, it should occur to readers that a great deal of territory within drama and education remains unexplored. One obvious void is the lack of attention to older students. Researchers have aimed few experiments or inquiries at the higher grades, as noted above, probably due to such influences as the educational psychology community's bias toward basic and early developments of children and the relative prevalence of classroom drama in the elementary classroom. And teachers may be much less inclined in middle school and high school to involve drama or dramatic play in their academic teaching repertoires because of their concentrations on academic specialties regarded as having little to do with play.³

An unquestionable omission in the body of work on drama presented here is substantive attention to many potential outcomes beyond reading and language development. The foremost candidates among these would seem to be any learning that results from the interpersonal and intra-personal qualities of assuming characters and interacting to perform narrative scenes. Theater professionals have long concentrated on the importance of character study in order to perform genuinely on stage or in film. Learning about characters with worldviews, beliefs, and assumptions different from one's own would be expected to lead to skills or traits valuable generally such as increased empathy and understanding of others' views—a student's personal character affected by studying dramatic characters.

A scan of our studies produces practically no references to theater. The entire world of theater in education— visiting troupes specializing in thematic production and discourse, school theater societies and productions, the annual school musical, the local children's theater company—benefits from no empirical research that managed to work its way into our files. We know very little on the basis of research about the effects of dramatic presentations to audiences generally, or about impacts on either the performers or the audiences in the case of school productions.⁴ Explanations are suggested above, including the fact that the older age groups involved in theater do not fall into the sights of reading development researchers. But surely elements of oral language development are involved in theater performance, as may be psychological developments of performing regularly on stage (such as self-confidence and esteem).

Conclusion

We could close this essay with a familiar refrain, "We'll have to leave such untested questions up to future research." And because we did not find these questions addressed in the vast literature considered for the Compendium, they do point to promising subjects of future inquiry. We can do added service to the topic by returning to the world that began this essay—the realm of professional knowledge. And once again to Dorothy Heathcote, whose compelling claims for drama comprise a tantalizing menu for future research.

Heathcote articulated what amounts to an inventory of "guarantees" —what she believes will happen when teachers use drama thoughtfully and effectively in their classrooms. The promised effects of drama she has culled from a lifetime of role-playing and observing teachers and students using drama touch on most subjects within the academic and social agendas of our schools. These "guarantees" are:

⁴ when we say we know little or nothing on the basis of research, we need to be clear These issues are not addressed in the studies selected for the Compendium, This does not imply that these questions have never been asked by researchers or that efforts of researchers have never shed a ray of light on them. We may have excluded studies relevant to thecal production based on our criteria of design and validity. and we may simply have missed deserving studies in our search.

1. Making abstract concepts concrete.
2. Teaching a narrow fact so that it is fully learned—placed in a context for added meaning.
3. Introducing artifacts so that children are curious about them and experience them at a significant level—an important quality of any learning.
4. Inducing students to reflect on experience and see what they have in common with other people.
5. Opening doors to curriculum areas students might fear to venture into, including science, mathematics, and literature.
6. Giving students freedom coupled with responsibility.
7. Clarifying values.
8. Developing tolerance for a variety of personalities and ideas.
9. Showing students how they can stay with something they don't like, perhaps geometry or Tennyson's poetry, to a point of accomplishment.
10. Increasing students' vocabularies and helping students develop a finer control of rhetoric through interactions with others.
11. Bringing classes into situations that will increase their social health.
12. Helping students discover that they know more than they thought they knew.
13. Leading students to the real world more clearly in light of what they have learned in an imagined one.
14. Helping students capture more of what is implicit in any experience. That is, dramatization encourages probing into the meanings of terms, the use of words in the context of action, the nature of human relationships and individual motivations—and more generally encourages reflection on experiences and what one is learning from them.

This list of promises reflects the drama professional speaking to educators and to learners. In reading through its elements, we can say that the drama studies in this Compendium have made a sortie or two into the hearts of these claims with profit to show for the effort. It also appears, on the face of things, that this inventory would receive widespread acceptance as a set of developmental goals. In addition to the aims it suggests for our children, Heathcote's list implies an attractive agenda for research on drama in education because it delves into promising outcomes that have never been put to formal tests. Succeeding in even a small part of this agenda would amply expand the state of research-based knowledge about drama in education on hand today.

³ It is worth observing that professional scientists, mathematicians. and even historians typically characterist an important component of their work play—the structured but unfettered exploration of ideas. This is not a typical quality of secondary school approach to learning and instruction, where the curriculum embraces the of historical playa—breakthroughs, inventions. molecular structure. persons, and dates—rather than on creating ideas.

METHODS

Fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students from New York City classrooms participated in an observational study. The students were talented in music, theater, or dance and were participating in a talent development program in their particular art form provided by ArtsConnection. The students were also in classrooms in which the arts were integrated into the regular curriculum, and in which the teachers were involved with ArtsConnection staff development.

Students were observed as they were taught the same academic content in two different formats—a traditional format without the arts, and one in which the arts were integrated. Observers documented the use of the following self-regulatory skills: paying attention, persevering, problem-solving, self-initiating, asking questions, taking risks, cooperating, using feedback, and being prepared. Students were also given a content-based quiz after each lesson.

Test scores in reading and mathematics were examined over a three-year period for a separate pool of students. Three groups of students were compared (no information was given about how many were in each group):

Young Talent Academic Group: Students participating in the Young Talent Program arts instruction and who were achieving on or above grade level in school. These students were presumably enrolled in classes that integrated the arts.

Young Talent at-Risk Group: Students participating in the Young Talent Program who were at risk academically, especially in reading. These students also participated in MAGIC, a program that also used the arts to support academic instruction in a manner similar to the arts-integrated classes.

Control Group: Students who were not participating in the Young Talent Programs in the arts, and who presumably were not enrolled in classes that integrated the arts with the curriculum.—E.W.

RESULTS

Self-regulation. Significantly more self-regulatory behaviors were seen in the lessons in which the arts were integrated into the curriculum than in lessons with straight academic instruction, as shown by correlated t tests, p<.001.

Content learning. Content learning in the arts-integrated vs. non-arts-integrated lessons in the same sample of students was examined via t tests. No significant differences were found for one lesson (p = .26). For the other lesson, students in the non-arts lesson did better than those in the arts-integrated lesson, a difference that almost reached significance (p = .07).

Reading scores at the outset of the study were highest for the Young Talent academic group and lowest for the Young Talent at-Risk group. While students in the control and Young Talent academic groups showed fairly steady performance over the three years, the Young Talent at-Risk students showed marked improvement in the third year (conclusions drawn from inspection of the graphs).

The extent of teacher training in arts-curriculum integration predicted reading scores for the at-risk students (with a correlation of .44).

Math scores were not enhanced by the arts program. But it should be noted that the arts in this program were integrated with the language-based curriculum, not with mathematics. At the beginning of the study, math scores were highest for the Young Talent academic group, and lowest for the Young Talent at-Risk group, as shown by an ANOVA main effect of Group, p <.001. All three groups gained in math over three years, as shown by a main effect of Time, p<.001. Neither of the two Young Talent groups, however, gained more than the control group.—E.W.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study is notable as one of the first to look at whether students show more self-regulation in arts-integrated classes, and because it examines the effect of the arts on academically at-risk children.

The study found that artistically talented students engaged in more self-regulatory behaviors during classes in which the arts were integrated into the lesson. But they did not learn more in such lessons than in traditional ones.

When artistically talented but academically at-risk students were involved over the course of three years in arts training, learned in arts-integrated classrooms, and participated in an additional program that used the arts to support academic classes, they made greater gains in reading than did a control group. In math, their gains did not exceed those of the control group, though this is not surprising since the arts in the program were integrated with the language-based curriculum, not with mathematics.—E.W.

COMMENTARY

It is not clear why the at-risk students showed significantly greater gains in reading (compared with the control group) than did the students who were not at risk. It may be significant that the arts programs received by the two groups of students were not identical Future research should compare both types of children in identical arts programs. Another possibility is that the at-risk students showed more reading gains because they initially lacked self-regulatory skills and hence were more helped by the arts-integrated classrooms. This hypothesis could be tested.

We cannot conclude from this study that the improvement in reading by the at-risk students was a result of enhanced academic self-regulation. If this were the case, students should have showed gains (exceeding the control group) in mathematics as well.

Future research should investigate whether these findings generalize to students not selected for artistic talent.—E.W.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD

This study's contribution to arts education research is its attention to the potential of the arts to serve as intermediaries in the learning process. That is, the study suggests that the academic value of the arts may reside as much in the ancillary behaviors and attitudes they encourage as in their direct effect on content acquisition. In this case, artistically inclined students seemed to self-regulate (a global term that encompassed several attention-related behaviors) themselves more in arts-integrated lessons than in "traditional" lessons (i.e., those without the arts involved). The researchers explore why—or why not—such integration might influence content and skill acquisition in other disciplines.—D.C.

COMMENTARY

In order for this study, and others like it, to have a high degree of significance for schools, it would have to explore in more detail the differences among the arts programs the different groups of students in the study experienced. Such probing might explain better why the researchers saw the results they did and would offer readers a clearer understanding of the researchers' definition of arts integration. The term "arts integration program" is much too broad to serve as a variable for a study. Instead, it is a category under which a host of specific practices gather. For research on arts integration like this to have the potential of having significant implications for education, the various implemented forms of arts integration will have to be illuminated brightly.—D.C.

"Significantly more self-regulatory behaviors were seen in the lessons in which the arts were integrated into the curriculum than in lessons with straight academic instruction."