Description
- Abstract:
- Field trips to see theater performances are a long-standing educational practice, however, there is little systematic evidence demonstrating educational benefits. This article describes the results of five random assignment experiments spanning two years where school groups were assigned by lottery to attend a live theater performance, or for some groups, watch a movie-version of the same story. We find significant educational benefits from seeing live theater, including higher levels of tolerance, social perspective taking, and stronger command of the plot and vocabulary of those plays. Students randomly assigned to watch a movie did not experience these benefits. Our findings also suggest that theater field trips may cultivate the desire among students to frequent the theater in the future.
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- Use and Reproduction
- In Copyright
Citation
Jay P. Greene, Heidi H. Erickson, Angela R. Watson, et al.,
"The Play’s the Thing: Experimentally Examining the Social and Cognitive Effects of School Field Trips to Live Theater Performances"
(2019).
EdWorkingPapers.com Archive.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:956651/
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EdWorkingPapers.com Archive
The Annenberg Institute at Brown University has developed this national working paper series to provide public access to high-quality papers from multiple disciplines on a wide variety of topics related to education. EdWorkingPapers focuses particularly on research with strong implications …...