The Play’s the Thing: Experimentally Examining the Social and Cognitive Effects of School Field Trips to Live Theater Performances

Five random-assignment experiments over two years; 47 lotteries producing 94 treatment and control groups, ~1,500 students; analysed n = 791-1,442 depending on outcome

US school groups, mostly secondary, attending professional productions of A Christmas Carol, Hamlet, Around the World in 80 Days, Peter and the Starcatcher and a university production of Twelfth Night. Surveys administered a mean of 54 days after the performance.

Included for one reason that no other arts study in the archive supplies: a genuine ACTIVE control. Two of the five experiments randomised a third arm to watch a film version of the same play, which isolates "seeing this drama" from "leaving school for an afternoon." Attrition was balanced across arms (77.6% play, 76.0% movie, 76.5% control). Grade B: randomised with matched sets, but every outcome is a researcher-made survey with no administrative or standardised achievement data anywhere in the study, and the research team has a long-running programme of publishing positive arts-field-trip results, which is why independence is recorded as developer-involved rather than independent.

Intent-to-treat effects: tolerance +0.142 (SE 0.065), social perspective taking +0.169 (SE 0.080), content knowledge +0.101 (SE 0.016), theatre consumption +0.127 (SE 0.069), theatre participation -0.109 (ns). The MOVIE arm was null on every single outcome (tolerance -0.038, social perspective taking -0.045, content knowledge -0.015, consumption 0.084, participation 0.008), which is the study's real contribution: whatever moved, it was not the field trip. Controlling for baseline in the two experiments with pre-tests (n = 475) removes half of it - social perspective taking collapses to 0.056 (ns) and theatre consumption to 0.130 (ns), while tolerance (0.182) and content knowledge (0.154) survive. Read strictly, what survives baseline control is a near-transfer effect (students who watched a play knew that play's plot and vocabulary) plus a small attitude shift.

Low by design - lottery assignment within matched sets. The threat here is not heredity but outcome construction: every measure is a self-report instrument built by the research team.

Unreplicated by any independent group. An earlier Education Next report of the same programme (Greene et al. 2015, 670 students) reported much larger single-wave effects - plot knowledge and vocabulary 0.63 SD, tolerance 0.26 SD - which deflated substantially in the pooled peer-reviewed estimates, the ordinary pattern for this literature. In tension with the EEF Speech Bubbles drama trial (n = 821), which was null on reading and on oral narrative recall using standardised instruments.