Creative drama in the writing process: The impact on elementary students' short stories.

This study investigated the impact of creative drama as a prewriting strategy, on both, the content and the process, of short story writing. Two grade 6/7 classes were involved in the study for a period of ten weeks, one receiving drama and the other one a lesson/discussion prewriting instruction. With regard to the scores the drama students received on their compositions in the nine categories measured (ideas, detail, audience awareness, sentence structure, language style, plot, setting, character, and narration/dialogue), they were slightly higher than those of the alternate group in the first of the two stories and highly significantly higher in the third story. The progressive increase in scores suggests that using creative drama as a prewriting activity is even more effective when used over a longer time span. The results also showed that students exposed to drama wrote longer stories, used more dialogue, and wrote more frequently in the first person. Other qualitative differences in the content of thestories between the two groups included students' approach to plot development, characterization, and setting description. The study also demonstrated that the students who received drama were generally positive about the prewriting activities, they enjoyed the writing process, and most frequently referred to their experience as being "fun".