Drama-based activities for STEM education: encouraging scientific aspirations and debunking stereotypes in secondary school students in Spain and the UK

This study presents findings from testing an innovative student-centred drama-based teaching methodology for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) disciplines for secondary school students. The method, based on performances, was tested in two case studies, Spain and the UK, on a sample of 2,089 students. These performances have been shown to be an effective way of generating a two-way dialogue between students and researchers, and prompting student reflections about researchers as role models, gender inequalities in science, and ethical issues in STEM careers and scientific research. Furthermore, they have enhanced young people’s positive attitudes and interest in science, scientists and scientific careers and have debunked science-related stereotypes. This indicates that the performances evaluated in this study are supporting the aspirations of young people, but not limiting their inclination to critically assess the relative benefits and risks of scientific development for themselves.


INTRODUCTION
In the current European socio-economic and political context, motivational and structural barriers constrain individuals' interest and active involvement in science and technology.
The need to address the challenge of engaging the public in science is even more urgent in the case of young people. Their considerable disenchantment with science and technology represents a critical limitation on European society's capacity to ensure its future capacity for innovation, excellence and competitiveness (Osborne and Dillon, 2008). Results from the Flash Eurobarometer (2008) on "Young People and Science" showed that less than a third of respondents had an interest in studying engineering (28%), natural sciences (25%) or mathematics (24%), compared to 36% and 39% who would consider studying economics or social sciences, respectively. In the UK, for instance, only 4% of respondents said they would definitely study natural sciences. The survey findings also suggested significant gender differences related to future career preferences (Littledyke, 2008), as boys were more interested in engineering and mathematics than girls, who generally argued that they did not have the skills to study engineering, biology or medicine. Similar data is obtained in Spain (Sainz, 2011). Although science itself involves curiosity, creativity, and imagination, European young people, especially girls, still perceive scientific complexity as a barrier and scientific careers as useless and unprofitable, which could discourage them from pursuing studies in scientific fields (Khale et al., 1993).
In recent decades, numerous authors have warned of the decline of scientific vocations in the European context (Convert and Gugenheim, 2005;Rocard et al., 2007;OECD, 2008).
This disaffection is being increasingly attributed to pedagogical issues, as the hypothesis of a relationship between the poor image of science in society and the lack of young people pursuing scientific vocations is being abandoned (Sjøberg and Schreiner 2007;Fouad et al., 2010;Regan and DeWitt, 2015;Sheldrake, 2016). In fact, many authors have reported evidence of a generally positive picture of science and the scientific professions among students. Jenkins and Nelson (2005) have used the paradox "important, but not for me" to explain the fact that, in practice, fewer and fewer students opt to pursue scientific careers. A substantial body of research has explored the interrelationships between aspirations and structural factors such as gender, ethnicity and social class (Eccles, 1994;Francis, 2002;Aschbacher et al., 2010;St Clair & Benjamin, 2011;Riegle-Crumb et al., 2011), making room for a deeper discussion about the need for intersectional analysis, in which teaching pedagogies are the centre of attention.
Arts-based educational approaches have been used in the last few decades both in education research-for instance, under the label "Arts-based Educational Research" (Barone and Eisner, 2012)-and more specifically in science education (Metcalfe et al., 1984;Ødegaard, 2003;Aubusson and Fogwill, 2006;Dorion, 2009). These approaches are characterized by the inclusion of elements from the arts (performance, literary writing, music, dance, storytelling, visual art and other mediums) in different stages of the research or educational process in order to express human experience, explore different forms of representation and convey meaning. Arts-based practices have been identified as particularly useful for projects that aim to describe, explore, or discover (Leavy, 2009), all of which are important features of a learning process. Specifically, applied dramareferring to dramatic activities that exist primarily outside conventional mainstream theatre institutions and have objectives that go beyond the artistic to include educational, social and political aims-has participatory, dialogic and dialectic qualities that constitute effective and democratic ways of learning (Nicholson, 2005). The integration of both rational and emotional dimensions within dramatic activities provides a rich source of individual and collective experimentation and exploration (Baraúna Teixera and Motos Teruel, 2009).
Furthermore, dramatic activities have been identified as particularly useful teaching and learning strategies for integrating affective and cognitive education into informed action (Littledyke, 2008). A recent meta-analysis (Lee et al, 2015) showed that drama-based activities have a significant impact on achieving outcomes in educational settings, especially if activities (a) were led by a classroom teacher or researcher rather than a teaching artist, (b) included more than five lessons, and (c) was integrated into English language arts or science curriculum compared to other domains As a collaborative art form, applied drama embodies a pedagogy designed to encourage interactivity and collaboration, emphasizing the centrality of the student in the pedagogical process. As a practice, knowledge in drama is embodied, culturally located and produced through interactions with others, generating new forms of social and cultural capital (Tveita, 1998;McNaughton, 2004). Engagement through arts-based approaches may support the integration and mobilization of multiple kinds of knowledge, imagination, and intelligences (including emotional, social or experiential) (Leavy, 2015;Rathwell and Armitage, 2016). Based on this insight, a limited number of studies have researched the impact that drama-based activities have on science education both at primary (Varelas et al, 2010) and at secondary levels (Bailey and Watson, 1998).
The potential of applied drama in science education to facilitate an understanding of STEM concepts and reflect on the role and use of science in society lies not only in communicating scientific concepts and bringing them to life, but also in addressing the nature of science as a transformative learning process embedded in a certain societal context. In this sense, arts-based methods in science education might operate through the inclusion of values and tangential social elements while teaching scientific concepts. The use of arts-based methods for debunking stereotypes has shown its effectiveness in a number of fields, such as in challenging gender bias in the gaming industry (Shen at al., 2016) or in sex education in secondary schools (Simons, 2011). In this sense, arts-based methods might be effective as a device for debunking science-related stereotypes. With this in mind, the hypothesis underpinning this study is that arts-based methods help to trigger emotions that facilitate the deconstruction of false myths and stereotypes related to scientific research and activity.
This study presents the findings from a project to test a new kind of student-centred drama-based teaching methodology called PERSEIA (PERformance-based Science Education Innovative Activities), aimed at fostering student engagement with STEM at selected secondary schools in Spain and the United Kingdom. In order to connect with the emotions and personal concerns of young people, PERSEIA challenges stereotypes associated with science, explores ethical issues related to scientific research, tackles gender barriers in STEM university programs and relates scientific knowledge with opportunities in the labour market. PERSEIA was developed within the framework of the European Commission Horizon 2020 project PERFORM (www.perform-research.eu), explained in-depth elsewhere (Ruiz-Mallén et al., 2018), based on drama-based teaching experiences for science that have been previously reported in both countries (for Spain check Dopico et al, 2015, for UK Lee et al, 2015.

PERSEIA delivery
PERSEIA is defined as a human-centred, arts-based approach to science education that uses theatre plays on the premise that to encourage scientific aspirations in young people it is not enough merely to talk about science in a funny way; we also need to include the human dimension of science. Within the research project PERFORM, a toolkit to create PERSEIA was developed, and resulting PERSEIA were piloted in secondary schools in Spain and UK. The schools were selected in these two countries because they were the only, within the PERFORM consortium, that hosted both academic and education partners). PERSEIA are based on two specific theatrical forms: stand-up comedy (used in the Spanish case), and science busking (in the UK). Scientific stand-up comedy involves individual monologues that use jokes and humour to deconstruct clichés and stereotypes and to explain everyday scientific activities or recent scientific discoveries.
On the other hand, Street Science busking is an adaptation of street theatre in which spectacular and surprising scientific experiments are performed in the street and in public places, followed by explanations. In addition, PRESEIA adapts stand-up or busking scripts to key agendas of Responsible Research and Innovation (Owen et al., 2012;Heras and Ruiz-Mallén, 2017), following the recommendations listed in table 1. Give special attention to girls in engineering: ü To strengthen girls' self-confidence to pursue studies in engineering/maths ü To highlight the social outreach of engineering Identify actual, important women scientists as role models. To give special mention to physicists, engineers and computational scientists.

General recommendations (GR)
Allow students to ask questions or to give their opinion during/after the PERSEIA.

Show a short video (3 to 5 minutes) talking about a scientific topic.
From December 2016 to June 2017, PERSEIA were delivered in 18 secondary schools, 9 in each country, inside the classrooms, to school groups between 15 and 200 students, amounting to a total of 2,089 students. These schools were located in low-income (5 in Spain, 4 in UK) and middle-income areas (4 in Spain, 5 in UK). The PERFORM project launched an open call to schools in the area of Barcelona (ES) and Bristol (UK) and the schools were selected regarding to their willingness to incorporate innovative teaching methods in their STEM courses, and the socioeconomic level of students. In Spain, PERSEIA took the form of stand-up comedy sketches that were presented in the school auditoriums so that they could reach a larger number of students (1,823 in total). In the UK, PERSEIA were delivered in the form of science busking shows, which necessarily involved fewer students. As a result, the UK version of PERSEIA reached 266 students.

PERSEIA evaluation
To evaluate the impact of the PERSEIA delivered to secondary school students, a repeated impact evaluation study was developed. This was conducted using ex-ante and ex-post self-administered questionnaires in both English (in the UK) and Spanish (

Students' STEM perceptions
To analyse students' perceptions towards STEM careers, the questionnaire incorporated two scales with three items each: one for positive and another for negative attitudes. In this sense, levels of agreement and disagreement on both scales were measured as indicators of the increase or decrease in the positive and negative attitudes towards STEM. Figure 1 shows the data for the positive attitude scale in Spain and the UK.
As shown in figure 1, all three indicators were slightly more positive in the Spanish case study after delivery of the PERSEIA. Conversely, science busking in the UK only achieved the goal of increasing positive attitudes for one of the indicators; meanwhile, both agreement and disagreement decreased for "Scientific knowledge is important for my future career" after the PERSEIA, meaning that students became more neutral on the question, and disagreement with the sentence "If I wanted to, I could be a scientist" increased after the PERSEIA. The results of both case studies were analysed by gender to see whether there were meaningful differences between boys and girls in relation to positive attitudes towards STEM subjects and jobs. In Spain (table 3) there were no meaningful differences except for the indicator "Scientific knowledge is important for my future career", for which there was a much higher increase in agreement among boys than among girls (12% vs. 3.3%).
This suggests that major efforts are needed in future PERSEIA to highlight the value of STEM for girls' careers.
In the UK case (table 4), a remarkable difference between boys and girls can be appreciated in relation to attitudes towards STEM careers. For the indicator "If I wanted to, I could be a scientist", girls' degree of agreement decreased after the PERSEIA by 11.7% while boys' increased by 4.7%, i.e. there is a difference between them of more than 15%. As in the Spanish case, major efforts are needed in future PERSEIA to highlight the value of STEM careers amongst girls. Table 3: Agreement, disagreement, and neutrality in relation to positive attitudes towards STEM in Spain, by gender. In addition to positive attitudes, indicators for negative attitudes towards science were also assessed after delivering the PERSEIA. In Spain, negative attitudes decreased in all three indicators of the scale (Fig. 2-A). In contrast, in the UK the indicators for negative attitudes increased, except for the indicator "Science is usually boring" (Fig. 2-B). As was done with the positive attitude responses, the results of the Spanish and UK case studies were disaggregated by gender to examine whether there were meaningful differences between boys and girls in relation to negative attitudes towards STEM subjects and jobs.

B
In Spain (table 5), all three indicators showed that negative attitudes decreased for both genders, but more acutely among boys than girls. In fact, girls' level of disagreement with the negative indicator "Science is not for me" decreased by 4.7% after having participated in the PERSEIA. In the UK case study (table 6), on the other hand, only the level of agreement with the indicator "Science is usually boring" decreased after the PERSEIA, while the other two negative indicators increased. In this case, girls were less prone to changing their negative attitude than boys.

Students' perceptions of science-related ethical issues
In order to determine how students perceive ethical concerns related to scientific activity, the questionnaire included a 2-item Likert scale. As in the previous figures, figure 3 shows the degrees of agreement and disagreement with these two items in the two case studies analysed. In this case, the option "Don't know" is included, as its results are relevant for the study.
In the Spanish case study, both indicators saw an increase in agreement after the PERSEIA, especially "Scientists follow ethical standards to pursue their studies", which increased by more than 10%. It is also remarkable that the "Don't know" answers decreased by 5%. There are no meaningful differences between genders in the perceptions of ethical concerns regarding scientific practice.
In the UK, ethical perceptions were also more positive after the PERSEIA. In this case, however, the ratio of respondents choosing the option "Don't know" was higher than in Spain and increased after the PERSEIA, reinforcing the idea that the science busking show, as a tool for transmitting RRI values, must be reformulated.
There were no meaningful differences between girls and boys in their perceptions of ethical concerns.

Students' perceptions of science-related gender issues
In order to determine the extent to which students perceive science as a gendered pursuit, pre-and post-surveys included two indicators related to this topic. The first asked how many female scientists they knew. Out of their responses, only the names of "real" female scientists were counted. The second indicator evaluated how gendered they considered six different professions related to science: veterinarian, computer programmer, theoretical physicist, nurse, astronomer, and engineer.  In Spain, 85.1% of the students who took the pre-PERSEIA survey did not know any female scientist, and this level decreased to 82.9% after delivering the PERSEIA.
In relation to how gendered they perceived each of the six professions, figure 4 shows that in general they perceived all of them as being able to be performed by both men and women. However, veterinarian and nurse were slightly more associated with women whereas programmer, theoretical physicist and astronomer were more perceived as men's jobs. After the PERSEIA, the perception that these professions could be carried out by both men and women increased for all cases except for the astronomer, which was even more associated with men in the post-PERSEIA survey. In the UK, 88.8% of the students taking the pre-PERSEIA survey did not know any female scientist, and this proportion increased very slightly to 89.2% after the PERSEIA. The gendering pattern was also very similar to Spain, with more than 70% of students agreeing that all six professions could be performed by both women and men equally. Nevertheless, veterinarian and nurse were perceived as more associated with women than men, in the latter case with more than 40% seeing it as a woman's job, whereas the other four were perceived as more associated with men. These patterns did not change much after the PERSEIA except for the engineer, as there was a 25% in the perception of women as engineers. The results are shown in figure 5. 0%  10%  20%  30%  40%  50%  60%  70%  80%  In Spain, all indicators of positive perceptions had a level of agreement of more than 60%. However, less than 40% of students agreed that attending the PERSEIA was positive for their learning of science. In the case of negative perceptions, the level of disagreement was higher than 60% in all cases, although the scientific monologues were more confusing for boys than for girls. In Spain, only 6.7% of students did not enjoy the PERSEIA (figure 6), consistent with the results obtained on the statement "The performance was boring", with which 12.4% of students agreed, and with "The activity was a waste of time", with which only 8.7% agreed (figure 7). The use of monologues to talk about science did not adversely affect the image that students have of the performers, as only 7.8% of students did not consider the performers to be scientific experts. In the same line, a very small 4.8% of the students did not trust the scientific information given during the performance and 13.1% considered it confusing, while 42.0% considered the performance important for their scientific learning (figure 6).

Assessment of performance styles
Showing a video was considered a good idea by more than 65% of respondents, especially among the girls (figure 6). Moreover, almost 30% of the students attending the Spanish PERSEIA agreed that they had actively participated in the event. Indeed, 27% of the students attending the event talked directly to the performers during the event (data not shown). This confirms that significant effort was made to achieve the goal of making the PERSEIA interactive, as stand-up comedy shows normally have minimal interaction with the audience. The use of social networking applications was moderate, with less than 50% of the audience having used them to interact with the performers (data not shown). All these results are shown in figure 6.6.
In the UK, two of the indicators for positive perceptions ("I enjoyed the performance" and "I trust the scientific information in the performance I attended") had a level of agreement of almost 80%. However, only 50% of students agreed that "The performers are scientific experts". In the case of negative perceptions, the level of disagreement was higher than 70%, although many boys responded neutrally to the question of whether the science busking event was confusing. The level of interaction with the audience was higher than in the Spanish case, with almost 50% of students stating that they had spoken with the performers and actively participated in the event.
This fact could be due to the fact that busking is delivered with smaller audiences than stand-up (

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
PERSEIA resulting from the adaptation of previous performance-based activities were delivered in 9 secondary schools in each country. In total, 2,089 secondary school students attended the PERSEIA shows. Although other assessment protocols have been published elsewhere (Klassen, 2006, Heras andRuiz-Mallen, 2017), we decided to create a new assessment protocol designed to evaluate the impact of PERSEIA. The evaluation methodology consisting of ex-ante and ex-post surveys has offered sound results that will support the review of the PERSEIA model for future use. These results suggest that the stand-up comedy activity is more effective than science busking in motivating students to engage with STEM and in challenging stereotypes associated with scientific research. The reasons for this difference can be found, as noted in the introduction, in the dramatic nature of these two art forms. As Quirck (2015) suggests, stand-up comedy has a stronger influence on audiences due to its power to trigger emotions. Stand-up comedians, Quirck argues, "serve an important prosocial function by testing those ideas that we take for granted, but also can coax us into behaving in a way we would not normally countenance." Nevertheless, while stand-up comedy was more effective than science busking at improving student attitudes towards STEM, the science busking show was more interactive, participatory and appealing, both for students and for performers. In this sense, we can conclude that emotional engagement might be more important for debunking stereotypes than interaction and participation.
Our working hypothesis is that arts-based methods help trigger emotions that facilitate the deconstruction of false myths and stereotypes related to scientific research and activity. Our results support this view and suggest that drama-based methods that foster emotional engagement are the most suitable. Very recently, pre-bunking and inoculation has been shown to be effective in reducing susceptibility to fake news related to climate change, proving that emotions and the mobilization of emotional doubts are key to debunking false myths (Banas and Rains, 2010;Lewandowsky et al, 2012;Roozenbeek and van der Linden, 2019). In this regard, our study adds to this line of research and can be viewed as further evidence to support an understanding of the mechanisms needed to change false opinions, myths and stereotypes.
Our study is a first step towards the development of innovative student-centred drama-based teaching activities for STEM directed at secondary school students that can debunk stereotypes and motivate interest. The protocol developed, however, requires further reflection and reinforcement with the views of other relevant stakeholders in science education, such as participating students and teachers. In this respect, further empirical work is needed for re-testing and improvement of both the assessment protocol and the teaching activities. We hope this research can support future studies and, in particular, that it can help secondary teachers improve their teaching methodologies and increase their students' motivation to take an interest in STEM.

DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING INTERESTS
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

FUNDING
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,