Daniel Willingham--Science & Education
Hypothesis non fingo
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Storify: Make science tell a story. 

6/3/2013

 
Elsewhere I have written about the potential power of narrative to help students understand and remember complex subject matter (Willingham, 2004; 2009). Now a new study (Arya & Maul, 2012) provides fresh evidence that putting to-be-learned material in a story format improves learning outcomes.

The experiment tested 209 7th and 8th grade students in the U.S. on texts about the discoveries of Galileo OR the discoveries of Marie Curie. The texts were developed to be as similar as possible in terms of syntactic complexity, vocabulary, accuracy, and other measures, and vary only in whether the information was presented in a typical expository fashion or in terms of a personal story of the scientist.

For example, one section of the expository text included this passage
And with this simple, powerful tool [Galilean telescope], we can see
many details when we use it to look up into the night sky. The moon
may look like a smooth ball of light covered with dark spots, but on
a closer look through this telescope, we can see deep valleys and great
mountain ranges. Through the telescope, we can now see all the
different marks on the moon’s surface
The corresponding passage in the narrative version read this way:
When Galileo looked through his new telescope, he could see the
surface of the moon, and so he began his first close look into space.
He slept during the day in order to work and see the moon at night.
Many people thought that the moon was a smooth ball with a light of
its own. Now that Galileo had a closer look through his telescope, he
realized that the moon’s surface had mountains and valleys.
Students comprehension and memory for the information in the text was measured immediately after reading it, and again one week later. The difference in recall between the narrative and non-narrative versions are shown as difference scores below.
Picture
These are difference scores, so taller bars reflect a greater advantage for the narrative version. The advantage of the story over expository was significant in all conditions except the Curie passage at the short delay.
Science lends itself naturally to narrative structure--authors can tell the stories of individual scientists, their struggles, their discoveries, and so on.

There's a case to be made that it also lends itself to a triumphalist view of science that is not accurate; scientists as heroes in an ever-progressing march towards Truth. Since Kuhn, that more or less Popperian view of science has been viewed as at least too simple, and more likely inaccurate.

But if it helps middle schoolers understand science, I'm inclined not worry too much about that point.

Instead, I'd like to broaden the view of "narrative." (I made this point in Why Don't Students Like School.) You don't have to think of narrative just as the story of an individual or group of people; you can think more abstractly conflict, complications, and the eventual resolution of conflict as the core of narrative structure.

I prefer to think of narrative in this broader sense because it is more flexible, and gives teachers more options, and also better captures the aspects of narrative structure that I suspect are behind the advantage conferred.

Reference

  Arya, D. J. & Maul, A. (2012). The role of the scientific discovery narrative in middle school science education: An experimental study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104, 1022-1032.
David Wees link
6/3/2013 05:22:14 am

How likely is this result to hold for other domains of knowledge, like math for example? I wonder also, if this effect holds when the learner tells themself a story about what they are learning?

Dan Willingham
6/3/2013 06:44:11 am

David
re: math I don't know the answer. History seems an obvious analogy. I think the extent to which it works when the student generates the story will, of course, depend on how much the student is expected to bring the table/how much the student knows.

David Wees link
6/3/2013 10:06:51 am

I've noticed that when people are attempting to remember a song, they nearly always find a place in the song (sometimes even the beginning of the song!) to start from with which they are familiar, rather than being able to jump right into the portion of the song which they know.

This leads me to suspect that memory is stored in chains, and that the "entrance" to these (probably) chronologically-based chains may be based on semantic connections, like "the place we usually start practicing this song." I wonder if, for example, people who learn words in a specific order are better able to remember those words, but are less able to remember the words without starting from the beginning of their list.

I wonder if those people who can memorize large sequences of pi are able to give numbers from any position in the sequence that isn't a position they started their practice from. I suspect that they wouldn't be able to do it.

Chris Chivers link
6/3/2013 07:48:40 am

Can see a clear link between teaching most subjects and storytelling, supported by storyboarding, as real images or a verbal story scaffold for a lesson.

It's like the difference between a script writer approach or having director notes and being able to improvise around a theme.

There will be differences in teacher's abilities to transcend the story to interpret fully and add value to the experience for all learners.

Marvin Suggs
6/4/2013 07:59:58 am

As a Science teacher I always 'story-tell' wherever possible to help students grasp concepts. It helps engagement, attention and subsequently encourages them to evaluate models, helping clarify oversimplifications. Isn't there something about stories that evoke an emotional response that help form more persistent memories? Great piece on memory, glad to see there's a place for storytelling from a cognitive point of view.

Joe Riener
6/5/2013 06:13:10 am

With my juniors in high school English, I offer an essay by Nadya Labi, "Want Your Kid to Disappear"? that appeared in the journal Legal Times. It tells of parents who sign their teen over to a "transport service" that takes this young person, often in handcuffs, to a behavior-modification school outside the US. It's quite a disturbing story of the abuse of parental rights, lack of oversight of this "transport service" and horrid conditions at these offshore schools-as-prisons. All because the parents have the legal right to do this. Then I offer some observations of the struggle over the centuries for habeas corpus rights. You better believe everyone of my students has a very firm grasp of this abstruse legal notion. Some parents also reported mysterious hugs and expressed gratitude on the part of their own teens, for the kind treatment these parents have bestowed upon them. Now that's teaching.


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    The goal of this blog is to provide pointers to scientific findings that are applicable to education that I think ought to receive more attention.

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