Behavioral Objectives in Creative Dramatics

Abstract

AbstractAn attempt was made to measure the effects of two distinct types of stimuli on the behavior of first-grade children in a creative dramatics situation. The first stimulus class used was verbal prompts. The number of responses to these prompts was counted for each child in each of five sessions. The number of prompts was increased from one to seventeen and then decreased to one. One prompt produced a median of six responses and seventeen produced a median of thirty-five. The second type of stimulus was the performance of a child used as a model. The number of motor and verbal responses to this stimulus per child were counted. When the model used was a consistently high scorer, the scores of the others were high, and when the model was a low scorer, the scores of the others were lower. Both experiments indicate that the performance of children in a creative dramatics situation is not only influenced by the stimuli presented to them but that the relationship between the stimuli and the performance can...