{"id":6251,"date":"2021-07-27T08:00:02","date_gmt":"2021-07-27T13:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/braindevs.net\/blog\/blog\/?p=6251"},"modified":"2021-07-25T10:39:00","modified_gmt":"2021-07-25T15:39:00","slug":"once-upon-a-time-do-stories-help-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/once-upon-a-time-do-stories-help-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"“Once Upon a Time”: Do Stories Help Learning?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Daniel Willingham wrote\u00a0Why Don’t Students Like School<\/em>, he accomplished a mini-miracle: he made abstract psychology research…<\/p>\n

…easy to understand<\/em>, and<\/p>\n

… obviously helpful <\/em>to classroom teachers.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Its invaluable pages include emphatically practical teaching advice: “memory is the residue of thought,” novices and experts think differently. (Little wonder its\u00a0third<\/strong> edition was just published.)<\/p>\n

In his third chapter, Willingham included one important strategy for helping students understand and remember:\u00a0use stories<\/em>.<\/p>\n

We understand and remember stories for many reasons:<\/p>\n

They follow a familiar cause\/effect structure<\/em>.<\/p>\n

They focus on people<\/em> and conflicts<\/em>.<\/p>\n

We (most of us) grew up<\/em> hearing stories.<\/p>\n

Stories evoke emotions<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Expository writing — essays, textbooks — has its own advantages, but they probably can’t compete with the advantages of narrative.<\/p>\n

Today’s News<\/h2>\n

Willingham first published\u00a0Why Don’t Students Like School<\/em> in 2009. What have we learned about narratives vs. exposition since then?<\/p>\n

After all, research conclusions change over time. Does this advice still hold?<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Raymond Mar and colleagues published a meta-analysis<\/a> of research on this topic. They wanted to know:<\/p>\n

Does narrative presentation of information improve\u00a0memory, <\/em>compared to expository texts?<\/p>\n

Does it improve comprehension<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Are there boundary conditions<\/em>?<\/p>\n

They identified 37 studies (with 78 data sets and more than 33,000 participants!) that matched their criteria.<\/p>\n

So, what did they find?<\/p>\n

The Envelope Please…<\/h2>\n

Sure enough, narratives help students understand<\/em>. And they help students remember<\/em>. And — this news is surprising to me — those benefits don’t have quirky exceptions. (Most research findings do: e.g., “This technique works in these<\/em> circumstances but not those<\/em>.”)<\/p>\n

For the stats minded, they calculated a Hedges’s g of 0.55. In my experience, that’s a surprisingly big effect for measurements across such a big field. (Hedges’s g is a version of Cohen’s d — it’s more appropriate for meta-analyses.)<\/p>\n

One of my favorite examples<\/a> of this strategy wasn’t (I believe) included in this study. McNamara and Scott asked students to remember a list of words. They coached one group to turn those words into a story.<\/p>\n

Given the words “foot, cow, shirt, hut,” students created sentences like “my foot was stepped on by a cow that wore a shirt and lived in a hut.”<\/p>\n

McNamara and Scott coached the other students to remember their words by “thinking out loud.”<\/p>\n

Sure enough, the group that composed stories<\/em> remembered<\/strong> a lot more words.<\/p>\n

Getting the Story Just Right<\/h2>\n

Although Mar’s meta-analysis did not find boundary conditions, I do want to add a note of caution. This advice — like so much of cognitive science — can be easily misconstrued.<\/p>\n

The idea makes sense, but its classroom application can be tricky.<\/p>\n

Imagine that, as a science teacher, I want my students to understand Boyle’s Law<\/a>. I’m tempted to tell my students that P1V1=P2V2, to define the various terms, and to run some sample problems.<\/p>\n

If I hear the advice that stories improve comprehension, I’m probably tempted to tell some interesting stories about Boyle’s life. For instance, he made a list a wish list of 24 inventions<\/a> (a machine that could fly, drugs that could “exalt the imagination”). Way back in the 1600s! So cool!!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That story is interesting and memorable, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the pressure or volume of gas<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I shouldn’t shouldn’t, in other words, tell stories about the general subject; we’ve got lots of research about the dangers of “seductive details<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

I should instead tell stories tailored specifically to the meaning and importance of the topic<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Why does the relationship between volume and pressure matter?<\/p>\n

Who else was trying to find out?<\/p>\n

What changed as a result of Boyle’s discovery?<\/p>\n

If I can fashion those questions into a story, now I’ve got all the characteristics of a memorable narrative: cause and effect, personal conflict, familiarity, and emotion.<\/p>\n

And, all those benefits attach to the content I want my students to learn<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In Brief<\/h2>\n

Do narratives help students understand and remember?<\/p>\n

Yes,\u00a0the right stories<\/em> do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Daniel Willingham wrote\u00a0Why Don’t Students Like School, he accomplished a mini-miracle: he made abstract psychology research… …easy to understand, and … obviously helpful to classroom teachers. Its invaluable pages include emphatically practical teaching advice: “memory is the residue of thought,” novices and experts think differently. (Little wonder its\u00a0third edition was just published.) In his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":6252,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lb-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6251"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6257,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6251\/revisions\/6257"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}