Does theatre-in-education promote early childhood development?

This quasi-experimental, multi-method study examines whether participation in a preschool theatre-in-education (TIE) program can promote emergent literacy, theory of mind, and imaginative development. This research combines quantitative assessments of children’s narrative comprehension, narrative production, vocabulary development, false-belief understanding, and imagination skills with a qualitative descriptive analysis of the implementation of a theatre-in-education program to investigate the effect of a respected preschool TIE program on the development of 155 urban children enrolled in Head Start. Although the measures used were unable to detect a significant effect of the drama intervention, in the current academic climate, in which an increasing focus on academics in preschool curricula can lead to the elimination of arts programming, it is worth noting that the inclusion of a TIE program did not detract from the children’s acquisition of skills that contribute to school readiness; the scores on assessments of language, perspective-taking, and imagination were similar for children in the intervention and comparison conditions. Thus, this study suggests that the inclusion of high-quality theatre arts curricula in early childhood education can provide young children with an entertaining and engaging preschool drama experience while providing academic supports commensurate with those of more traditional early childhood programs.