The Impact of Creative Drama Education on Development of Social Skills of Elementary School Students

Abstract

Social development can be defined as the adaptation process of persons to the society in which they live. The children learning the rules and value norms accepted by the society and live in harmony with the community is in parallel with the positive development of education of the child. Creative drama education plays an important role on development of behaviors with social content such as distinguishing social behaviors, reducing negative and noncompliant behaviors, entering into good relations with peers and establishing themselves in the community. The research was performed by offering creative drama-based education to a group of 14 elementary school students between the ages of 7 and 12 for 22 hours. During the education activity, single group preliminary test-final test model, one of experimental research designs, was used as method in order to be able to measure the impact on social development of students. The data were collected with personal information from using Scale for Developing Social Skills (SBDO) which was devised by Akcamete and Avcioglu (2005). As a result, it was detected from the general outlook of social skills evaluation scale of students included in the study that there was statistically significant difference between scores obtained before and after education, and that the scores obtained by students from the scale as a whole after education showed statistically significant increase.Keywords: creative drama; elementary education; social skills