Evidence

Why each part reaches one player, and not the room.

Whatever a player is given in Spontar — a line and its cue, a prompt when they dry, a situation to improvise or a picture — reaches that player's card and nobody else's. Much of the product is practical: no paper, no prompt called across the room, every turn called on time. This one design choice has a research background. The work below, on feedback, on audiences and on drama teaching, is why we think being given something in front of everyone is not free. It was all published before we existed, and none of it studied Spontar.

One plain line about scope: this research is about feedback, audiences and improvisation. What we say about rehearsing a script — the cue and line on the card, the display modes, the silent prompt, the record of dries — rests on what the build does, not on any study.

You are The customer

You backtrack fast, insisting that won't be necessary after all.

flustered

A part seen by one person only — beat 7 of the library scene Returning the shoes, on the customer's card. What follows is what the research says about audiences and feedback, not about this product.

What is well established

Three findings, none of them ours.

Over a third of feedback interventions make performance worse.

The largest meta-analysis of feedback ever assembled — 607 effect sizes across 23,663 observations — found an average benefit of d = 0.41, and that more than a third of interventions reduced performance. The organising explanation is where the feedback sends attention: effectiveness falls as attention moves up from the task toward the self. A correction called across a room is feedback that arrives with an audience attached. This finding concerns feedback in general; it was not tested on Spontar.

Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254–284. DOI

Being watched degrades complex performance specifically.

A meta-analysis of 241 studies covering close to 24,000 people found that the mere presence of others speeds up simple tasks and impairs complex ones — both the rate and the accuracy. Improvisation is the complex case: holding a character, listening, and responding to something unplanned. The audience in a drama class is not incidental to the exercise, which is exactly why adding a second, evaluative audience on top of it is not free.

Bond, C. F., & Titus, L. J. (1983). Social facilitation: A meta-analysis of 241 studies. Psychological Bulletin, 94(2), 265–292. DOI

Drama-based teaching works, and works best when the classroom teacher runs it.

A meta-analysis of 47 quasi-experimental studies from 1985 to 2012 found a positive, significant effect of drama-based pedagogy on achievement. The effects were strongest when the work was led by the classroom teacher rather than a visiting artist, ran to more than five lessons, and was integrated into the curriculum rather than bolted on. It is also honest about its limits: the effect on social skills was not significant. Spontar is built for the teacher who already runs the room, over a term, which is the condition the evidence favours — and it is not sold as a social-skills intervention, because that is not what the data supports.

Lee, B. K., Patall, E. A., Cawthon, S. W., & Steingut, R. R. (2015). The effect of drama-based pedagogy on PreK–16 outcomes: A meta-analysis of research from 1985 to 2012. Review of Educational Research, 85(1), 3–49. DOI

Where the practice comes from

The pedagogy is older than the evidence, and older than us.

Side-coaching is defined in Viola Spolin's Improvisation for the Theater (Northwestern University Press, 1963): a short instruction given while the exercise runs, aimed at keeping a player on their point of concentration. Spolin's argument — that a student focused on a game behaves naturally while a student focused on acting does not — is the reason an improvised beat in Spontar is a situation and a feeling, and leaves the words to the player.

We did not invent any of this. A prompt typed in Live mode is the nearest Spontar comes to side-coaching, and it is slower than three words spoken in the room — the spoken note stays the teacher's. What we changed is how a player's part, prepared or typed in the moment, reaches the one player it is for.

The rest of the lineage — Johnstone, Boal, Close — is on the about page .

What we have not shown

Honestly: nobody has studied Spontar.

The three findings above concern the mechanism — how feedback lands, what an audience does to a complex task, whether drama teaching raises attainment. They are not evidence about this product, and we will not present them as such.

There is no trial of Spontar. We have not measured whether a private card changes what a class is willing to risk, whether rehearsing with the cue and line on a card gets a cast off book sooner, whether a silent prompt costs an actor less than one called across the room, or whether any of this shows up in a grade. We believe it helps. Belief is not a finding.

If you run a department and would like to look at this properly, we will help. We can provide usage data about your own institution, we will not ask for anything about individual students, and we will publish what you find whichever way it comes out. Write to us.