Building on research showing social-emotional benefits from a single live theater performance, this study tests for significant differences in pre to post social-cognitive outcomes among a racially and economically diverse sample of young audiences who attended the same theater performance with or without additional pre- and post-show educational…

While prior studies have addressed bullying experienced during school, limited research exists on the associations between participation in school-sponsored extracurricular activities and bullying victimization risk. The current study utilized data from the 2013, 2015, and 2017 National Crime and Victimization Survey's School Crime Supplement (n =…

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of science theater plays on secondary school students' attitudes towards the subject of science and their views on scientists. The study was conducted with 38 seventh-grade secondary school students over a six-month period. The "Scale of Attitudes Towards the Subject of Science" and the…

Guided by the following questions: (1) What are the experiences of immigrant children attending schools in communities experiencing police brutality and anti-immigrant sentiments? (2) How do middle school children of immigrants visually represent their experiences with legal violence? and (3) What are children's visions of freedom and community…

In this article, we examine the fraught task of doing drama-based work on the climate crisis with youth in schools at a time of increasing climate fatalism. We focus on what a virtual, speculative fiction writing and performance workshop achieved with students in Coventry, Kaohsiung and Bogotá by inviting them to rewrite the futures of local…

Internationally, research documents a link between children's creative engagement in Arts and their experiences of positive wellbeing. Yet this is at odds with both the provision of Arts curricula in England's education system (which continues to decline including substantial cuts to resources and staff), and longitudinal research reporting a…

This study investigated whether the Science on Stage, a theatre and drama project, taught middle-school students more about the lives and discoveries of great scientists and whether it helped them develop positive views and attitudes towards the science course and scientists. This 8-month study employed an embedded design. The sample consisted of…

As youth media creation programmes proliferate, educators and practitioners are learning how to develop stories that interrupt hegemony and point to new ways of being. This research, carried out in an ethnically diverse middle school, highlights the way digital storytelling as an applied theatre praxis brought complexity to student work. The role…

Field trips to museums and performing arts centers are not a frequent activity for most students, so how do cultural organizations learn to make the most of these limited but potentially valuable "gateway experiences" toward increased arts participation? This cross-sectional study examines the engagement of students during a performance…

Schools and districts have long grappled with race- and disability-based exclusionary discipline inequities. Research on the topic has uncovered a variety of systems that maintain such disparities, including school policies and practices that exacerbate the problem. Researchers and practitioners have increasingly considered school context and…

While the effect of Readers Theater (RT) on English oral reading fluency has been extensively investigated, research on the effect of RT on adolescents' English reading and listening comprehension was scant and yielded different results. This research aimed to explore how RT instruction influenced English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students,…

The purpose is to investigate process drama for teaching civics, mainly democracy and migration. Process drama implies students and teacher to take on roles, to explore a subject content collectively. The study is based on a secondary school educational initiative where a drama pedagogue was invited to address civics through process drama. Four…

Shaping OurSpace was an urban planning project asking children to propose plans for a housing project phased for redevelopment. Our primary aim was building visual-spatial thinking. McCormack's (1988, 2011) hierarchical framework was used to operationalize visual-spatial thinking, and we believe that embodied cognition served as a vehicle for…

Theater-based approaches have been implemented globally as a health education and behavior change strategy for decades. Studies have shown that live theater performances can engage an audience and influence the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of audience members. Moreover, literature has shown that adolescents find theater-based interventions…

This paper highlights an investigation of how middle school students responded to a theatre performance designed to portray science as a humanistic and relatable endeavour that youth -- similar to the youth in the audience -- engage in during their everyday lives. The play included in this study was generated as a part of a design research project…