Field trips to see theater performances are a long-standing educational practice; however, there is little systematic evidence demonstrating educational benefits. This article describes the results of five random assignment experiments spanning 2 years where school groups were assigned by lottery to attend a live theater performance or, for some groups, watch a movie version of the same story. We find significant educational benefits from seeing live theater, including higher levels of tolerance, social perspective taking, and stronger command of the plot and vocabulary of those plays. Students randomly assigned to watch a movie did not experience these benefits. Our findings also suggest that theater field trips may cultivate the desire among students to frequent the theater in the future.
Regular salary equity studies can be a best practice among employers committed to salary equity and fairly managed compensation. While a well-constructed salary study can identify inequities for amelioration, a poorly constructed study can create rather than solve problems. Organizations may be deterred from doing these studies because of their inherent analytical challenges. We provide a guide for human resource managers describing how to conduct their own salary studies, how to interpret the results, and how organizations can apply the results. We describe best practices across public sector organizations and illustrate them with an example from higher education. We also provide a link to an online appendix containing sample code that can be used to conduct such analyses using two popular software packages. The twin goals of the article are to increase the quality of salary analyses while reducing the barriers to conducting them.
Field trips to see theater performances are a long-standing educational practice, however, there is little systematic evidence demonstrating educational benefits. This article describes the results of five random assignment experiments spanning two years where school groups were assigned by lottery to attend a live theater performance, or for some groups, watch a movie-version of the same story. We find significant educational benefits from seeing live theater, including higher levels of tolerance, social perspective taking, and stronger command of the plot and vocabulary of those plays. Students randomly assigned to watch a movie did not experience these benefits. Our findings also suggest that theater field trips may cultivate the desire among students to frequent the theater in the future.
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