Toward Creativity

Do Theatrical Experiences Improve

Pretend Play and Cooperation
among Preschoolers?
•
Meredith L. Rowe, Virginia C. Salo,
and Kenneth Rubin

The authors ask if participating in an early-childhood theater production

improves pretend play and cooperation among preschoolers. They examined
play sessions immediately before and after productions of interactive early-
childhood performances at Imagination Stage, Inc. and measured children’s
engagement, cooperation, pretense, and misbehavior. They found that par-
ticipating in the performances enhanced the cooperation and pretense of
preschoolers. The authors discuss their results in relation to the role of the
arts and of play in early creativity and social-competence development. Key
words: cooperation; creativity; early-childhood development and the arts;
make-believe; pretense; social competence

Introduction

Researchers note a steep recent decline in creativity among American

children, a “creativity crisis” (Bronson and Merryman 2010). An analysis of
scores on a standardized test of creative thinking for school-aged children from
1966 to 2008 revealed a significant decrease in scores since 1990, particularly
for students in kindergarten through third grade (Kim 2011). The same study
also highlighted that much of the drop in creativity occurs before the end of the
early-childhood period. Creativity may be on the decline because children do
not have the opportunities to play as often as they did in the past (Howes 2011).
As a result of the No Child Left Behind Act, which went into effect in 2001,
there has been a shift in early-childhood curricula to focus more on school
readiness skills such as literacy and numeracy and, therefore, a reduction in

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American Journal of Play, volume 10, number 2 © The Strong

Contact Meredith L. Rowe at meredith_rowe@gse.harvard.edu
194 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF P L AY • WINTER 2018

opportunities for free play. However, researchers argue that play and learning do
go hand-in-hand (Zigler 2009) and that depriving children of play denies them
vital opportunities to practice important cognitive and social skills to develop
their imagination and creativity (Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2008; Pellegrini 2011; Roskos
and Christie 2013).
Gopnik and Walker (2013) provide evidence that engaging in pretend play
facilitates causal reasoning and hypothesis generation by allowing children to
exercise the ability to consider different scenarios. Several studies show a similar
link between engaging in pretend play and divergent thinking (the ability to
generate a variety of solutions to a problem), a skill considered foundational to
creativity (see Russ and Wallace 2013 for a review). Participation in the arts also
facilitates creativity and social and cognitive development, yet the links between
arts experiences and developmental growth are not especially clear (see Winner,
Goldstein, and Vincent-Lancrin 2013 for a review) and many researchers have
noted that we still have much work to do in this area (e.g., Reed, Hirsh-Pasek,
and Golinkoff 2012).
Here we examine the role of the arts in children’s play and development by
asking whether participating in an early-childhood theater production improves
preschoolers’ pretend play, creativity, and social competence (cooperation).

Pretend Play, Creativity, and Cooperation

Scholars have studied the role of play in children’s development for more than
fifty years. Theoretical work outlined the developmental trajectory of particular
types of play (Piaget 1962) and the role of play in children’s cognition (Vygotsky
1967). Educational thinkers have posited that play promotes creativity and
flexible thinking (Bruner 1972; Pepler and Ross 1981). Further, more recent
theoretical accounts have emphasized the specific role of social pretense, or
sociodramatic play, in the development of children’s perspective-taking skills
(Bergen 2002; Rubin and Howe 1986), theory of mind (Harris 2000; Harris and
Jalloul 2013), and social competence (Coplan et al. 2015).
Social pretense—in contrast to other forms of play and to nonsocial pre-
tense—serves at least three essential functions (Howes 2011). First, it creates a
context for mastering the communication of meaning. Second, social pretense
helps children learn to collaborate and compromise through their discussions
and negotiations concerning pretend roles and scripts and the rules guiding
 Toward Creativity 195

the pretend episodes. Third, social pretense provides a comfortable and natural
context in which children can explore and discuss issues of intimacy and trust.
We can, thus, consider sociodramatic play a marker of social competence in
early and middle childhood (Rubin, Fein, and Vandenberg 1983).
Pretend play, which enacts the imagination (Mitchell 2007), functions to
develop capacities that allow and encourage creative thought (Picciuto and Car-
ruthers 2012). During early childhood, children increasingly engage in social
pretend play (Rubin, Watson, and Jambor 1978). Engaging in pretend play relates
to children’s later ability to understand others’ points of view (Youngblade and
Dunn 1995). Sociodramatic play with peers supports children’s divergent think-
ing and cognitive flexibility, core components of creativity (Russ 2004; Singer and
Singer 2005). Further, research shows that in controlled experiments, preschoolers
trained in sociodramatic play have greater gains in measures of imagination and
fluency (Dansky 1980a, 1980b) than children trained in exploration; and children
in preschools with a focus on play scored better on the Torrance Tests of Creative
Thinking than children in academically focused classrooms (Hirsh-Pasek 1991).
Thus, play, and in particular, social pretend play, appears to foster creativity in
young children when we measure creativity by a variety of different standards.
Finally, peer play may also contribute to young children’s cooperation
(Berk, Mann, and Ogan 2006). According to Vygotskian theory on the benefits
of play (Vygotsky 1967), children voluntarily restrain themselves by following
social rules when playing with peers. The peer group provides children with
practice at working together; at conversing to understand the viewpoints of
others; at observing, imitating, and engaging in shared goals; and at taking
responsibility to help meet such shared goals (Gauvain 2001; Pellegrini 2009;
Rubin, Bukowski, and Bowker 2015; Tomasello 2009). In an observation of three-
and four-year-olds in their preschool classrooms, Elias and Berk (2002) found
that children who spent more time engaged in sociodramatic play with their
peers at the beginning of the school year exhibited more cooperative classroom
behaviors several months later.

The Arts and Development

Researchers pay less attention to the role of the arts in child development com-
pared to the role of play in development. The limited research on the positive
impact of engagement in the arts primarily highlights the social and cognitive
196 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF P L AY • WINTER 2018

outcomes of music training and the visual arts rather than the performing arts
(see Winner 2006 for a review). However, a few promising studies show links
between drama experiences and developmental outcomes, particularly in the
verbal realm (Winner, Goldstein, and Vincent-Lancrin 2013). A meta-analysis
(Podzlony 2000) provides evidence that engagement in creative drama activities
supports verbal skills (Winner 2006). Additionally, researchers have shown that
providing preschool children with experience in drama or acting out stories
improves spoken narrative abilities (Nicolopoulou and Richner 2007) and writ-
ten ones (Moore and Caldwell 1993) .
It is not surprising that drama training would relate to narrative skills in
preschoolers, because this type of training constitutes, in many ways, a form
of sociodramatic play. That is, “acting” involves role playing in the company
of peers and using language in a decontextualized manner to produce or com-
prehend a story. Interestingly, recent research shows that drama training in
school-aged children (eight- to ten–year olds) improves social cognitive skills
including empathy and theory of mind (Goldstein and Winner 2011, 2012).
The performing arts and sociodramatic play both require active collabora-
tion. Collaboration and coconstruction, or working together toward a goal,
can lead to success in creativity or social problem solving in the real world
(Sawyer 2008).

Method

In our study, we built on this previous work about the role of the arts and play
in early-childhood development by examining whether engaging in an early-
childhood theater production enhances children’s sociodramatic play, creativity,
and cooperation.

Sample and Procedures

We collected data for this project during live early-childhood theater perfor-
mances at Imagination Stage, a children’s theater in the greater Washington D.C.
area. The performance, titled “Inside Out,” concerned a brother and sister who
play together before bedtime. Some of the main themes of the show included
transforming objects (e.g., clothes) into other objects, nonliterality, and meta-
phors, and making up stories while engaging with the materials on stage. The
performance lasted for thirty minutes, during which children sat on the same
 Toward Creativity 197

level as the actors around the circular stage, thus allowing for easy interaction
with the actors and materials. Throughout the performance, actors encouraged
the children to engage either physically or verbally with them on stage and off.
At the start of the performance, each child received a set of props, and several
times throughout the show the actors asked the children to engage with the props
in particular ways. For example, the actors led the children, each of whom had
been given a pair of socks, through an activity in which they pretended the socks
in their hands were fish. Also, several times throughout the performance, the
actors asked the children to call out ideas for the actors to incorporate into the
performance. After the performance, the actors provided children with dress-up
clothes for a seven-minute, postperformance, free-play session on stage.
For ten of the performances, we added a similar play session immediately
prior to the performance. Thus, we observed the children while they took part
in free-play sessions immediately before (preplay) and after (postplay) they par-
ticipated in the age-appropriate performances. There were both preplay and
postplay sessions for ten performances. For five performances, we did not add
a preplay session so that we could compare postplay ratings with and without
the preplay experience.
Data collection took place at a total of fifteen performances in December
2014 and January 2015. Approximately thirty children attended each per-
formance, making for a total of approximately 450 children we observed in
groups in all performances. The children were three- to five-years old, and
they came from local preschool or kindergarten programs. All play sessions
were live coded, meaning that coders assigned ratings during the play sessions
or immediately after.

Coding and Reliability

Trained research assistants who were blind to the goals of the study live coded
the seven-minute preplay and postplay sessions. That is, coders watched the
play sessions as they occurred and globally rated the groups using a five-point
Likert scale on five different dimensions intended to capture the extent to which
children, as a group during each play session, cooperated and engaged in pre-
tense. During the postplay-only sessions, all four coders observed and coded the
play sessions simultaneously. During the performances which included both a
preplay and postplay, we assigned two research assistants to code preplay and
two others to code postplay. The two coders assigned to the postplay session
remained outside of the performance hall during the preplay sessions. The cod-
198 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF P L AY • WINTER 2018

ers sat several rows behind and above the stage in an amphitheater-style seating
so they had an unobstructed view of the entire stage area but could hear the
children during the play sessions. The seating area was unlit, which obscured
the children’s views of the coders.
The five dimensions on which coders made ratings included: cooperation
(e.g., sharing materials or playing together toward a common goal, such as play-
ing house together); misbehaving (e.g., taking materials from another child,
pushing); character-driven pretense (e.g., putting on a tie and pretending to be
dad); object-transforming pretense (e.g., pretending that a pile of scarves is a
puddle to jump in); and overall engagement (i.e., the extent to which the group
as a whole was engaged with the materials and each other).

Figure 1. Behavioral coding dimensions

 Toward Creativity 199

We separated pretense into character-driven and object-transformation

dimensions for two reasons. First, when we tested the coding scheme, we found
that these categories best capture the primary pretense in which children engaged
using our materials, but they remained distinct because one involved pretending
to be someone else and one involved transforming an object into something else.
Second, research suggests that playful object transformations, such as those using
a stick as a sword or a banana as a telephone, provide a basis for subsequent
problem-solving proficiency (Bjorklund and Gardiner 2011; Cheyne and Rubin
1983; Sylva 1977), particularly solving divergent problems or problems with
multiple solutions (Pepler and Ross 1981; Wyver and Spence 1999). Researchers
often use divergent problem solving as a measure of creativity (Russ 2004; Singer
and Singer 2005), and thus we considered the object transformation score as a
preliminary measure of creativity during play.
We trained four coders on the coding scheme using videos of previous play
sessions from the same performance provided by the theater. Then, all four cod-
ers coded the five postplay-only sessions. For the remaining ten performances,
we randomly assigned coders either to the preplay or postplay session, to prevent
coders from artificially inflating the postplay scores. Although we attempted to
keep coders impartial and blind to the purpose of the study, watching consecu-
tive play sessions with the same children may have influenced a coder’s ratings, so
we averaged ratings for each session across coders, and we calculated reliability
by comparing the five postplay-only sessions from all four coders. We computed
intraclass correlations coefficients (ICCs) with a two-way mixed-effects model
with average measures (Shrout and Fleiss 1979). ICCs describe how well the dif-
ferent coders scores align with one another or how consistent they are. Average
ICCs across the five items was .80 and all were well within the good or excellent
range (Cicchetti 1994): .67 for cooperation/collaboration, .82 for not behaving,
.81 for character-driven pretense, .92 for object-transformation pretense, and
.77 for engagement.

Results

We conducted paired t-tests to compare the preplay and postplay session scores
on each coding dimension. Results show that postplay scores were significantly
higher than preplay scores on four of the five categories (see figure 2). Dur-
ing the postplay sessions, children were more cooperative (t = -2.27, p = .049),
200 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF P L AY • WINTER 2018

engaged in more character-driven pretense (t = -2.94, p = .016), and enaged in

more object-transformating pretense (t = -3.45, p - .007), and were more socially
engaged (t = -2.68, p = .025).
Importantly, we also compared postplay sessions when no play session
preceded the performance (n=5) and when a play session did so (n=10) to
determine the effects, if any, of engaging in a preplay session. We conducted
independent samples t-tests with a Levene correction for unequal variances.
Cooperation and misbehaving showed such an effect. Children were more
cooperative (t = 3.45, p = .004), but also misbehaved more frequently (t = 2.51,
p = .028), when they participated in a preplay session as compared to when they
did so only in a postplay session. Thus, some of the effect of the theater experi-
ence on cooperation at postplay may be due to the children’s previous experience
with the materials during the preplay. However, the increases in both measures

* p < .05 ** p < .01

FIGURE 2. Average preplay and postplay session scores.

 Toward Creativity 201

* p < .05 ** p < .01

FIGURE 3. Average postplay scores for groups who had only a preplay session
and those who had both a preplay and postplay session.

of pretend play do not seem to be due to the preplay experience.

Discussion

The current study adds to other research on the role of the arts and play in child
development. We examined whether participating in an early-childhood the-
ater production had immediate effects on children’s pretense and cooperation.
We found that children did indeed use more character-driven pretense and
produced more object transformations, such as using one object to represent
another (a potential early indicator of creativity), during the postplay than during
the preplay. Children also collaborated more often in postplay, yet our follow-
up analyses suggested that the increase in collaboration may have been due to
their prior experience playing with the materials together during preplay. Our
202 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF P L AY • WINTER 2018

findings suggest that engaging in early-childhood theater may be one route to

improving pretend play and, ultimately, creativity in young children.
We could consider these findings in light of the previous literature and sug-
gest future steps for related research. Recent work suggests that enhancing arts
education may promote creativity in children (Reed, Hirsh-Pasek, and Golinkoff
2012; Winner, Goldstein, and Vincent-Lancrin 2013). Our study concurs with
that viewpoint and suggests that one pathway for positive effects could come
through the role of play. That is, our work brings together the literature on the
benefits of play during early childhood with the literature on the benefits of the
arts, and it offers a theoretical model where the arts (specifically the performing
arts targeting young children) may promote social pretense that, in turn, helps
foster divergent problem solving and potentially other social-cognitive skills.
In a recent review of the literature on play and development, Lillard and
her colleagues (2013) examined the relation between play and children’s devel-
opment and concluded that pretense may play a more causal role (Vygotsky
1967) in some aspects of development such as narrative and social skills, but
for other outcomes such as theory of mind and creativity, play may represent
more of an epiphenomenon (Piaget 1962). For example, the authors proposed
that the relation between pretend play and other positive developmental out-
comes might reflect some other common child characteristic, like heightened
intelligence. However, several researchers have challenged the epiphenomenon
perspective, citing a need for more thorough research (Harris and Jalloul 2013;
Nicolopulou and Ilgaz 2013). We agree with these authors that the relation
between play and other social-cognitive skills seems more than just an epi-
phenomenon and that more work should be done in this area to tease out the
mechanisms involved. Further, we point to the arts during early childhood
as a potential facilitator of play in the first place and, thus, of creativity and
development more generally.
Our results cannot speak to the issue of whether the experience needs to
be “live” or whether there are other similar experiences that could play the same
role in promoting social pretense. Our hunch is that the experience needs to
be live rather than televised, because we know enough now about the role of
social interaction in learning (Kuhl 2007) to make this hypothesis. However, it
is very likely that some other social experiences, such as storytelling and acting
out stories, would have similar effects—as shown in preschool classroom work
by Nicolopoulou and colleagues (2015). However, the beauty of early-childhood
theater experiences is this: they are designed to be play based themselves and
 Toward Creativity 203

encourage the child to take another person’s perspective and participate in the
play. We think this allows the child more freedom to create than would other
adult games of make-believe. And, this experience also exposes children to a
form of art, which is important in and of itself.
One related limitation of our study is that we could not assess each child
individually or follow the development of each child over time. We aim to do
so in future research, and we hypothesize that increased experience with early-
childhood theater could influence not only pretense and cooperation but ulti-
mately more specific indexes of creativity such as divergent problem solving and
language and literacy skills. The latter would include, in particular, narrative
skills (Nicolopoulou and Richner 2007) and other social-cognitive skills such as
empathy and theory of mind like those found with older children engaging in
theatrical training (Goldstein and Winner 2012). Further, taking an individual
approach in future work will enable us to determine whether this type of experi-
ence is more beneficial for some children than others.
During the preschool period, some children are more outgoing and socially
competent than others. It is likely that these children are popular with their peers
(Rubin, Bukowski, and Bowker 2015). It would be interesting in future research
to identify which children are the first to imitate the actors or play with the mate-
rials. And it would also be interesting to see if these children invite their peers
to join them in social pretense—an exercise known to predict the development
of theory of mind and creativity.
Alternatively, there may be some children for whom the theatrical expe-
rience proves overwhelming. This group of children might be identified as
behaviorally inhibited or extremely shy (Rubin, Coplan, and Bowker 2009).
Given that play does influence social and social-cognitive development, it
would be important to identify the ways and means by which such children
could be encouraged to participate (perhaps in smaller group settings). Such
notions have yet to be examined in empirical research; it would be timely
to do so.
In sum, our findings suggest that early-childhood performing-arts experi-
ences can have positive and immediate effects on young children’s cooperation
and pretend play. We see this as a first step in a line of work examining the social
and cognitive outcomes of such arts experience for preschoolers. Indeed, by
providing high quality early arts experiences and more opportunities to play, we
may be able to overcome the growing creativity crisis evident in America today
(Howes 2011; Kim 2011; Reed, Hirsh-Pasek, and Golinkoff 2012).
204 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF P L AY • WINTER 2018

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