In reviewing the article on mixed methods research and then trying to find a suitable article with which to marry the findings and conclusions of both, I found it difficult to locate quantitative empirical research about teaching high-school drama class. Many articles on teaching Drama appear in periodicals that seem to divorce themselves from the formality of academic research and as Susan Davis (2017) intonates in her research paper Drama and arts-based professional learning: exploring face-to-face, online and transmedia models, “There is also a significant gap in the provision of quality professional learning programs for teachers.” Although this paper explores an Arts program designed for learners in their early years, it makes concerted efforts to provide the practitioner with robust measures of quality in its mixed methodology.

In the paper by Alicia O’Cathain (2015), there is a first attempt to create a framework for assessing the quality of mixed methods research based upon the editors’ own work (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009). The article “Assessing the Quality of Mixed Methods Research: Toward a Comprehensive Framework” (O’Cathain, 2015), is a meta-research paper that reveals a need on the part of the author to create a new method of assessing quality in mixed method research. This is due in part as an attempt to retain the validity of quantitative methods as they are applied together with qualitative methods by assuring quality on eight domains that can be applied to both types of research. The 8 quality domains frame assessment of such research and include assessment of planning, data collection, interpretation, and application in real-world settings.

Susan Davis takes a mixed methods approach to examining drama and arts-based professional learning models using similar tools to measure for quality. This was done perhaps partly in reaction to piloting the project with the help of agencies outside of the university and going to two different professional theatre companies with establish education outreach programs to help build the model of instruction that would improve teachers’ confidence and ability to use drama and arts-based learning in their classrooms. Going outside the university to find experts in the field of drama shows an obvious lack of confidence in the ability and knowledge of the instructional-model builders themselves and reiterates the idea that there is a gap between academia and the practical creative and performance arts communities. This somewhat mirrors the finding mentioned by O’Cathain (2015) that 76% of 226 researchers reported that criteria for quantitative and qualitative research should be separate and different for both. The separation of researcher and practitioner may be a detriment to learning communities and both O’Cathain’s and Davis’s research may illustrate a need to bridge the two communities closer together.

Davis’s mixed-method approach was conducted in three phases and used the main tools of pre and post-questionnaires, an evaluation survey at the end of the face-to-face workshop called the Open Box Project, and documentation of online sessions. The survey tools used were a series of Likert scale statements, and online interviews contained open-ended questions collated and coded thematically for analysis. 30-35 teachers for two iterations of the study were recruited through self-nomination by expressed interest on a form distributed through professional networks. The data collected for the study was provided by teachers only and no classroom observations were conducted, and no student feedback was used or administered. Using the transmedia method of delivery allowed for a more accurate reflection of direction that most professional training institutions are taking in the teaching and delivery of their programs. This also opened the study to the questions of quality and validity that were brought forward and addressed by O’Cathain (2015) in her attempts to create a structure for assessing mixed methodologies of research.

The proposal that Davis was based on an assertion by two other research papers (i.e. Alter, Hays, & O’Hara. 2009; and Bamford, 2006) that poor arts programs could be worse for student learning outcomes than no arts programs at all and that primary generalist teachers feel they lack significant prior experience and confidence in the arts. Davis’s study was intended to measure the in both quantitative and qualitative ways the amount of confidence gained by primary teachers who voluntarily enrolled in a professional workshop and implemented the practices learned into their own classrooms. Davis went on reiterate the notion that there was a significant gap between teacher preparation and expectations of the curriculum set out by making further supportive references of this phenomenon to 14 other research articles which included one of her own. Design of the programme was aided by approaches to drama in education found in 6 articles, one of which was published by two of my own former methods instructors from the University of Victoria, Miller and Saxton (2004) whose primary focus in drama methods was directed to elementary teachers or teachers who were using drama as a second subject area as part of their BEd requirements for secondary curriculum.

The findings and conclusions that Davis reported was that the professional workshop did have positive effects on the participant teachers’ level of confidence and ability to use drama as an educational mode of learning. Davis supported this by using the notion of proximal development as described by Vygotsky (1978) and the apparent growing popularity of using boundary objects as described by Star (2010) to explain how the Open Box project could be translated from the workshop and repurposed in a variety of ways by the participant-teachers in their own classrooms.

The reporting of findings was narrowly provided by teacher feedback only, and therefore verification of the five areas of student learning identified could not be validated under O’Cathain’s domain of data quality (specifically data transparency and sampling adequacy). This may have been mitigated by collecting feedback from not only the teacher’s students but also the facilitators of the Open Box Project workshop, and perhaps observations made in classrooms by the researchers or an objective third party with observation guidelines in hand. Davis also used purely anecdotal evidence to show her key findings regarding teacher learning and admitted that only a small number of teachers used the online tools to build a community of learning. What appeared to contain elements of quantitative methodologies may not have been as rigorously utilized which might explain why Davis chose to make her findings and conclusions in the more qualitative manner that she did.

Admittedly, Davis states that the findings are tentative at best, but that the capacity for using Drama in education at the primary level with more formal training, resources, and online support has the potential to address the gap in teacher confidence and ability.

It is perhaps the very nature of Drama education as an art-based form wherein much of what is learned as curricular content is a by-product of a wider collaborative creative process that does not lend the study of it to more formal and quantitative forms of research. So, although Davis did employ elements of quantitative methodology, her conclusions and findings adhered more closely to a qualitative research project than to a mixed-methods approach when examined through the lens of O’Cathain’s meta-research on quality assessment.

I myself, as a classically-trained actor, have had the unique fortune of taking my Drama students through a learning process that begins with the development of basic skills that could be quantitatively measured within precise rubrics, but then whose mastery would be measured within a collective form of performance that would be more than difficult to quantify as the number of variables needed to measure individual success would necessitate an algorithm to basically include what it means to be human and interact with others and an audience in a meaningful way. I tell my students if they can have just one audience member or classmate be able to relate to their convincing and creative performance, then they have succeeded as much as any of the greatest actors of all time.

So in my humble estimation, I, too, employ some forms of quantitative analysis very early on in a students development of their tools of the craft of acting, but then open the analysis wide open to ensure a measure of success that is tangible for each student in their own way. Is this a house of cards? Or perhaps my training has given me the good fortune to build on a foundation that is carefully planned and measured to ensure a broader idea of success.