Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin… Story time may be among the least likely things you’d expect to find in a science class, but when Lewis Stewart and his colleagues realised students’ working memories were being overloaded with complicated ideas, they decided to turn to the power of spinning a yarn to help weave meaningful learning…
What was the problem you were finding in science lessons?
There are often instances in chemistry – as well as in other subjects – where our students are required to commit multiple stages in a process to memory. Often such processes require our students to hold multiple “interacting elements” in their working memory at any given time.
When we ask students to explain how two elements can chemically combine in an ionic bond, for example, they must consider the electron structure for each element, how many electrons may be transferred, what effect this has on the atom’s charge and the properties of the new compound formed. You can can see how this might overwhelm students, and quite often, such tasks did.
We also identified a further problem that a lot of our explanations and modelling in science had to be delivered at distance from the students and often in rooms unsuitable for many science demonstrations. Therefore, we had to consider a way of improving the quality of our explanations and modelling of abstract concepts, without exceeding our students’ working memory capacity.
What sort of impact was this having on students?
Whenever task challenge is too high, or when our students lack the required prior knowledge to manage incoming information, we risk damaging their perceptions of their own competence or providing negative learning experiences that may leave them feeling less motivated. Our school is situated in a disadvantaged area, and some of our students have low levels of resilience.
We hope to leave our students feeling successful after every lesson, but we cannot shy away from delivering the more rigorous and challenging aspects of our science curriculum. Delivering this ‘powerful knowledge’ – which takes our students beyond their lived experience – is our duty as their teachers, and their greatest chance in increasing their opportunities.
What made you think about storytelling as a possible remedy?
Reflecting on my experiences teaching the history of the atom, my students could visualise the University of Manchester’s buildings as “the birthplace of nuclear physics” after I explained how physicist Ernest Rutherford’s desk still remains irradiated to this day. This nestled the core knowledge of his observations and conclusions within a memorable story.
I feared the story was extraneous, or that I was perhaps wasting precious time, but the durability of my students’ knowledge, evident in later retrieval quizzing, suggested the story helped enforce meaning and made Rutherford’s alpha-scattering experiment even more memorable.
After reading literature from Daniel Willingham, I thought the durability of my students’ knowledge may be a result of the “privileged status of story in memory” (Willingham, 2004). Literature suggests anchoring new ideas in stories may increase motivation and provide a strong base for students to return to if they later forget (Pashler et al., 2007).
Research from the past 30 years suggests stories are specially placed in memories, referred to as “psychologically privileged”. Such stories contain the 4 Cs:
1. Causality: related events in a story
2. Conflict: obstacles preventing a goal from being met
3. Complications: new problems which must be solved
4. Characters: observing characters in action
Stories that require readers to infer meaning through making what are known as “medium-level inferences” are deemed more interesting (Willingham, 2004). This supported my decision to evaluate how storytelling may develop conceptual understanding in chemistry.
When implementing stories in my classroom, I had to carefully consider the degree of causality and the level of inferences my students must make. Evidence suggests stories with medium-level inferences are also most accurately recalled (Keenan et al., 1984).
Therefore, developments in the story must be sequenced to ensure students can draw their own connections between related events. Willingham (2004) proposes stories provide a non-threatening and interesting introduction to new concepts (Willingham, 2004).
So how does this work in practice?
If the intended knowledge is difficult to model and abstract with lots of interacting elements, a story may be useful. If the knowledge contains a series of events or stages in a process, influencing one another in turn, then a story with high causality may support students in recalling each stage.
We made a magnesium atom into a character, who was tired of carrying around two extra electrons, this represented the conflict and created a goal for the story. Another character, a fluorine atom, offered a solution to the goal, by offering to take an electron from magnesium. A complication was introduced, the fluorine atom could only take one of magnesium’s electrons.
However, the solution of fluorine’s twin brother arriving and offering to take an electron provided a memorable solution to the problem. The causal events in the story made each step in the process explicit and memorable.
If the knowledge requires students to evaluate, compare or contrast ideas, the story should be adapted. When students were tasked to compare processes of purifying water, they recalled more of the stages in each process and their respective advantages and disadvantages when we had a character set in a familiar location, trailing each method and facing challenges along the way.
It is also important to note students must be invested in the story’s characters, enveloping them in the inquiry process. To achieve this, the teacher may consider making the conflict and complications “affectively charged” – capturing topics relevant to students, such as family, friends, and identity formation (Isabelle, 2007, p.23).
What sort of response have you seen from students so far?
After introducing stories into our science curriculum over multiple groups, we observed an increase in student performance on extended response questions relating to each story and increased performance on independent practice questions. Students retrieved stories with an accuracy of 87 per cent after a delay.
Six months on from story one, students in Year 10 can still fully explain ionic bonds between elements. In an end-of-unit assessment, every student successfully explained the ionic bond between two atoms. Although our stories were only recently introduced and more rigorous studies should be conducted before making any firm claims of their success, the early indications suggest storytelling in science is improving student retrieval and performance in extended answer questions.
Lewis Stewart is an Expert Teacher at See the Mountain, operating in Cheshire, Staffordshire and Greater Manchester
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