Application of Drama-Based Teaching Mode in Chemistry Teaching

Enhancing students’ scientific career understanding is a key goal in chemistry education. This study designed a scientific career-oriented drama activity, which is a worthwhile method to promote students’ insights into scientific professions. Students participated in a seven-lesson drama series with three progressive activities. The first activity focused on the development and evolution of the concept of redox reactions, involving a journalist and scientists, such as Lavoisier, Frankland, and Thomson. The second activity centered on metallurgical engineers smelting different metals, anticorrosion engineers coating zinc blocks on iron ships, and circuit engineers etching copper circuit boards with ferric chloride. Finally, the third activity involved juice engineers exploring the science behind the browning of apples and techniques to prevent it. Three activities involved progressive requirements: For the first drama activity, students extracted the script creation strategy by reading an initial script. Students created a second script using a script creation strategy, and rehearsed the script with guidance on using drama-based teaching strategies. For the second drama activity, students simply read the script aloud and briefly presented the scenes involving the different scientific careers included in the script. For the third drama activity, students further applied the script creation strategy to write their scripts with teachers supporting rehearsals and integrating drama-based teaching strategies. Subsequently, students performed script exhibitions using drama performance strategies. Forty ninth grade junior high school students participated in these activities. More than 85% of the students reported having “slight deepening of understanding” or “significant deepening of understanding” of the important qualities of scientific professionals, indicating that these drama-based teaching strategies effectively helped students recognize these qualities. More than 70% of the students developed preliminary scriptwriting skills, and about 70% of the students used drama performance strategies to improve the effectiveness of drama performances.