Effects of Dramatic Play on Classroom Problem-Solving Ability

Abstract

The effects of a dramatic play program on problem-solving skills were investigated. Students were twelve second and third grade students in an integrated school in a southern university community. One second and one third grade class participated in an 11-week dramatic play program developed to teach social studies. Two other classes, one second and one third grade, served as controls. Effects of the treatment were measured by a problem solving test composed of a series of comprehension type questions?including items from the WISC, the WAIS, and the Stanford-Binet?administered at the end of the treatment to the twelve children who displayed the least verbal and social skills on pretest measures. Results showed significant differences between the experimental and control classes on the problem-solving test. Thus, the dramatic play program was concluded to have had a significant effect on problem-solving ability. WITH THE great expansion of accumulated i knowledge, there has been an increasing emphasis on the need for children to learn to think effec tively (5). It is especially important in today's complex society that future citizens be knowledge able about that society and able to communicate and interact effectively with each other. If one of the functions of the school is to provide children with the skills they need to adapt to their en vironment, since society is changing so rapidly, an important goal would be to increase their ability to recognize elements of social causation, generate alternative solutions to problems, and exercise flexibility in thinking, and to assume some measure of personal responsibility for so cial problems they encounter. This emphasis on the process of thinking and problem-solving has resulted in an emphasis on learning by doing. Thus, numerous curricula have been developed in areas extending from math and the physical sciences to social studies and litera ture. These programs view the child not as passive recipient of knowledge but as active participant in the teaching-learning process. Parallel to these academic curricula has been the development of programs which allow the student to learn social behaviors by doing, i.e., by prac ticing ways of interacting and solving social prob lems. Thus a considerable amount of effort has been directed toward the development of teaching techniques which simulate real social processes. One of these is the introduction of role playing or dramatic play into the classroom. Role playing is a spontaneous technique developed by Moreno (9) which has been widely used to produce be havior change in a variety of settings ranging from management training to psychotherapy. Several sets of materials and examples of role playing situations for classroom use have been developed (11). Furthermore, numerous teachers have developed their own programs involving role playing. These methods must ultimately be evaluated in terms of the criterion of the degree to which they teach the content and skills that are needed for success in the world outside the classroom. To the extent that it is possible to produce a simulated environment (a realistic rep resentation of a real problem area), the teacher can produce realistic learning about actual situa tions (7). Although evaluation of this criterion would require observation of the child coping with his real environment,, some measures might be made of the effectiveness of role playing in increasing specific skills. A few studies have sug gested that role playing may be effective in pro ducing change in the area of school motivation and the acquisition of knowledge. For example, a Russian study (8) found that role playing not only allowed children to learn and practice new forms of behavior, but also helped create motiva tion when the tasks were uninteresting. Another study (4) found better attention to, and reten tion of current news items when those items were portrayed by secondary school students. Sarbin (10) found that role playing of roles found in everyday life (e.g., farmer, delivery boy) was more effective than usual instructional devices in helping retarded children respond to and learn about everyday social events. Only a few of the studies of role playing in the classroom used ob jective evaluations and experimental controls.