Teaching History Through Theater: The Effects of Arts Integration on Students’ Knowledge and Attitudes

Abstract

Faced with accountability pressures and limited resources, education policymakers make difficult choices regarding school curricula. In recent years, studies have documented a decreased emphasis in arts and humanities instruction. One potential way for schools to fill this gap includes partnering with arts and cultural organizations to provide arts learning opportunities through arts integration, yet there is limited evidence on the effectiveness of such programs. We examine one such partnership by evaluating the efficacy of a program that infuses history content with theater. By randomly assigning school groups to participate in this program, we are able to draw causal conclusions about its effects. We find that students demonstrate increases in historical content knowledge, enthusiasm for learning about history, historical empathy, and interest in the performing arts as a result of this program. These findings suggest that there are valuable educational benefits from arts-integrated learning opportunities provided through school partnerships with arts organizations.

Interdisciplinarity in Teacher Education: Evaluation of the Effectiveness of an Educational Innovation Project

“…These results are in line with those from similar studies, which found evidence that demonstrates the positive effect that interdisciplinary designs have on both preservice teachers [22,23,66] and school children's learning [12,16,21,35,59]. They all confirm the educational value of the interdisciplinary experiences, as an innovative methodology for teacher education, and justify the need to continue advancing in this field to provide preservice teachers with interdisciplinary models that can be replicated in their teaching experience.…”

“…If we consider the results obtained from the students who formed part of the Test Group, they coincide with those from other studies relating to museum-based interventions [57,59], which confirm that the primary school children who were involved in the interdisciplinary experience had a positive perception of museums as places for learning.…”

“…These results make it impossible to demonstrate that the interdisciplinary activity at the NAM led to significantly higher improvements in any of the study's variables. However, although other interdisciplinary projects have obtained statistically significant results that show an improvement in Mathematics performance [16,21,35], or understanding of Social Sciences content [16,59]; there are also studies carried out with primary and secondary school children related to both museum-based interventions [58], as well as interdisciplinary approaches [18] that, like this one, have had unexpected results.…”

“…The National Archaeological Museum was used as educational resource as museums are privileged spaces that address different topics [54][55][56][57][58][59], they enable knowledge to be shared and therefore offer a source of inspiration for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary proposals which involve both History [59,60] and Mathematics [33]. Numerous studies highlight the important role that museums have as cultural spaces and learning communities [46,54,55,57,58,61,62], both from a student's perspective [57][58][59]63,64], as well as a teacher's perspective [56,65]. Furthermore, interdisciplinary project practice was included in the teacher education (role-play at the NAM, simulating the role of students and future teachers), so that the preservice teachers had the opportunity to experience the difficulties of performing the dual role of student and teacher [66].…”

Supporting Academic Vocabulary and Social-Emotional Skills of Students With Learning Disabilities Through an Arts-Integrated Social Studies Approach

“…Graham and Brouillette (2016) found that students in Grades 3 through 5 increased their knowledge of physical science content through visual- and dramatic-arts-integration techniques. Kisida and colleagues (2020) also found that dramatic-arts integration was effective for teaching history content to students in Grades 3 through 5, showing that students increased their academic content knowledge and enthusiasm for history, perspective taking, and interest in the arts.…”