The Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas is offering free tickets to students in fifth through eighth grades for a live performance at Theatre Squared in Fayetteville as part of a research project.

School groups of up to 30 attendees can apply online for free tickets to a performance of Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne at 10:30 a.m. on either Dec. 10 or Dec. 16. The deadline to apply for the tickets is Oct. 6.

Jay Greene, a professor of education reform, is paying for the tickets with funds from the endowed chair he holds in the College of Education and Health Professions. He is designing a study to compare what students learn from the experience of attending a live performance to what students learn who don’t see the play.

Greene is continuing research he began last fall by giving students free tickets to either A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens or Hamlet by William Shakespeare. The department partnered with TheatreSquared last year, too.

“We got some very interesting results last year when we offered students the opportunity to see Hamlet or A Christmas Carol. Those findings will be published in a journal next month,” Greene said. “We are expanding this research to a third play this year because we want to see if younger students are similarly affected by live theater. A larger sample will also help us learn how different sub-groups of students, such as minority and low-income students, may be differently affected by seeing live theater.”

Greene, who holds the Twenty-First Century Chair in Education Reform, also plans to study how student interest in the arts, critical thinking skills and values are affected by a culturally enriching school trip to the theater. Greene and his graduate students have been conducting similar research on school field trips to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Walton Arts Center.

“The continuation of the TheatreSquared project,” Greene said, “is helping us build a robust research program about the role of culturally enriching experiences in education.”

Researchers will compare the experiences of the students who receive the free tickets and view the performance to the experiences of a second group of students who do not see the play.

“People in the arts and education have long believed that culturally enriching field trips have important educational benefits, but without rigorous random-assignment studies it has been hard to prove the causal connection between arts experiences and positive student outcomes,” Greene said. “With this research, we can know with confidence that any differences observed between treatment and control group students are caused by seeing a live theater performance, which could be important in informing educational leaders, policymakers and philanthropists about how to allocate resources to culturally enriching activities.”

All students who apply for the tickets will get a free ticket to attend another performance next year, so that even those not chosen for the treatment group in the study will be rewarded for completing a survey used in the research.

TheatreSquared, now in its ninth season, offers 130 annual performances at Walton Arts Center’s Nadine Baum Studios. The company is Northwest Arkansas’ only year-round, professional theatre company, and it was honored in 2011 by the American Theatre Wing, founder of the Tony Awards, as one of the nation’s 10 most promising emerging theaters.