teachers integrate drama strategies into language arts curriculum for sixth and seventh grade students and to evaluate the extent to which the drama-integrated language arts curriculum positively affected students’ English language arts (ELA) and mathematics performance and level of school engagement.
• Fifty-six percent of students in the treatment group achieved passing rates on the 2009 language arts assessment, compared to their counterparts in the control group who had a 47 percent passing rate.
• Forty-three percent of students in the treatment group achieved passing rates on the 2009 mathematics assessment, compared to their counterparts in the control group who had a 39 percent passing rate. However, the difference in the mathematics achievement was not found to be statistically significant.
• Participation in the arts-integrated treatment group increased the likelihood a student would pass the state test by 77 percent for language arts and 42 percent for mathematics.
• In the year following the EAT program, 78 percent of the students in the treatment group passed the language arts test while only 69 percent of students in the control group passed. Specifically, students in the treatment group outperformed their control group counterparts on the persuasive and speculative writing portions of the eighth-grade language arts test. Though there was a slight gain in mathematics scores for the treatment group in eighth grade, the difference was not statistically significant when compared to the control group’s eighth-grade mathematics scores.
• The researchers used absenteeism as a gauge for student engagement. Students in the treatment were absent fewer days than their counterparts in the control group. This trend continued into the eighth grade. (Walker, E., Tabone, C. & Weltsek, G. ,2011).