Elaine Walker, Carmine Tabone, and Gustave Weltsek: "When Achievement Data Meet Drama and Arts Integration"

Educational Arts Team (EAT) logo

In a study reported in the May 2011 edition of Language Arts, Volume 88, No. 5,  Walker, Tabone, and Weltsek examined the effects of a theatre strategies project on both mathematical and language arts performance.  Researchers wanted to know the following:

• To what extent was student achievement in mathematics and language arts positively impacted by theatre-strategies integration with language arts curriculum?
• To what degree were students able to sustain gains, once they returned to traditional instruction?

Subjects, Grade 6 and 7 Language Arts students, were drawn from eight New Jersey urban public schools.  All eight schools had a multiracial and multiethnic setting: 39% Latino, 36% African descent, 14% Asian, 10% Caucasian, and 1% other.  Approximately 80% of the students received free/reduced lunch, indicating low socioeconomic/disadvantaged backgrounds.  Four of the eight schools received drama training; the other four served as a control.

In 2008, EAT (Educational Arts Team) received a grant from the New Jersey Department of Education to develop a series of forty multimodal drama lessons, collaboratively created by teaching artists and teachers.  The lessons spanned the course of a year, addressing district-mandated novels for Gr. 6 and 7; in-service professional development workshops and teacher-training were also provided. Previously, EAT had enjoyed successful results from their first grant, where students' standardized test scores had risen as a result of drama integration into Grades 4 and 5 social studies and language arts curriculum.  Students employed voice, body, and visual representations to intepret stories. Lesson plans examined textual sections of novels via various theatre strategies, such as drama games, scenery design activities, process drama, improvisation, script writing, and enactment, and also incorporated state standards for reading and literary interpretation.  The drama-infused curriculum deliberately built upon students' experiences, scaffolding public meaning-making into deeper understanding of literature,  and aimed to support students in re: confident and clear written expression of ideas.

Through collaboration, artists and teachers discovered four natural points of intersection between literary and dramatic arts standards:

• scenery design and setting
• acting and understanding the characters
• directing and understanding theme, plot, and relationships between characters
• script-writing and dialogue

These four points served as scaffolds for language arts standards for the middle grades, namely

• visualizing and establishing the setting of the text
• becoming skilled at observing, describing, analyzing, and inferring
• understanding how characters experience situations from different perspectives
• understanding characters' relationships to one another
• predicting what could come next in a story
• developing the ability to write from the perspectives of different characters in the text
• relating the material to personal experiences

Walker et al also provided some examples of how drama strategies were integrated into language arts curriculum.  The models reflect a deliberate sequencing of activities: oral interpretation, embodied meaning making, performance, then traditional writing.

• Descriptive writing: EAT adapted a theatre exercise for beginning actors to develop sense memory for use with props on stage.  Students were asked to observe a small personal object, then describe it to a partner.  The class then created a classification grid with various descriptive categories, e.g. shape, texture, color, emotional attachment, place, people, in order to create linkages between personal and public, academic literacy practices and to see connections between the imagined, the spoken, and the written.  The grid became the starting trigger for written reflections on the object.  The class then moved from descriptions of concrete objects to considering crucial objects described in the novels they were reading, imagining them, describing them orally to a partner, then writing about them and explaining their significance.
• Exploring themes in a novel: To explore possible themes in a novel, the teacher asked the class to respond to a statement capturing the dilemma presented by a theme, e.g. "Everyone should always follow the rules".  First, students responded physically via body language, using the "Vote From Your Seat" strategy, where sitting down=disagree, sitting w/ hands raised=unsure, stand up=agree, stand up, with hands in air= strongly agree, with the teacher eliciting oral responses from a range of students as to why they responded as they did.  Next, a theme from the novel was introduced with a statement, and again, students were invited to respond to the statement and explain their position.  Then the teacher read a section of the novel related to that theme.  The section was then dramatized, initially using drama strategies such as tableau or living sculpture, with volunteers playing characters; gradually, dialogue was added, both from the text, as well as improvised lines.  Students were then asked to write a persuasive letter to the novel's protagonist, from their characters' points of view

Researchers measured student achievement via New Jersey's 2009 and 2010 achievement data, in the form of scale scores and achievement bands.  School engagement was measured using attendance data.  Approximately 56% of those in the experimental drama group passed the language arts proficiency exam, compared to 43% in the control group.  In math, 47% were successful on the state assessments, versus 39%.  Even controlling for gender and socioeconomic status, being in an arts-integrated classroom increased the odds of passing the state language arts assessment by 77%, and the math assessment by 42%.  The experimental group students also were slightly less likely to miss school.  In regard to sustained gains, the researchers tracked 338 seventh graders into eighth grade: of those, 215 had received arts-integrated language arts, and 123 traditional pedagogy.  On the eighth grade assessment, 78% of those who had received arts-integrated language arts were proficient, versus 69% of those who'd received traditional instruction: a statistically-significant figure.   While there were no discernable differences in regard to students' reading and interpreting text, the arts-integrated students outperformed the control group in regard to persuasive and speculative writing.

The findings of this study are promising, especially in regard to how arts-integration can improve academic outcomes, particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.  Teachers from schools who'd received arts integration also had positive reviews of the program in regard to their own professional development and ability to incorporate arts in their curriculum.  Walker et al conclude by stating that "the systematic infusion of drama strategies enables students to physically, orally, and visually generate ideas for writing; develop the voice of a particular piece; clarify the intended audience; and create a rehearsal for the intended genre of writing."  In an era of diminished support for the arts and program cuts, the authors underscore that serious investments ought to be made for further research into effective literacy strategies, such as drama-integration.