Pedagogy | Story-Based Instruction

Welcome to our "Cognitive Apprenticeship Books (2001)" web page. Sources for this bibliography may include Ingenta, ERIC/AE, UnCover, and various university library catalogs.

Personalization of instructional context can take many forms. For computer-based instruction, these forms include personalized stories, games, tutoring, and dialogue. In the personalized story form, generic referents of persons, places, or things can be changed to personalized referents, and in theory this kind of familiarity can make the instruction more meaningful for the user (Gagne, Bell, Yarborough, & Weidemann, 1985; Kintsch & Greene, 1978; Mandler, 1978).

Mathematics story forms, in particular, can also take on numerous variations, such as stories where mathematics calculations are presented in verbal (e.g. "twenty taken away from fifty") versus symbolic (e.g. "50 - 20") forms. Verbal forms alone were selected for the instructional stories in this experiment. This is consistent with contemporary views of teaching mental computation skills as the manipulation of quantities, rather than the manipulation of symbols (Reys & Barger, 1994). It is also consistent with teaching number sense beyond rigid algorithms (Sowder & Kelin, 1993). Many scholars also recommend that new mathematical operations be presented in children's "ordinary" or "natural" language before being presented in formal mathematics terms, such as with stories (Irons & Irons, 1989; Nesher, 1989). Presenting mathematical operations in concrete situations provides for meaningful connections between children's understandings and applications of operations (Nesher, 1989; Rathmell & Huinker, 1989).

Story forms may also be supplemented with practice exercises, personalized dialogue (Ferguson, Bareiss, Birnbaum, & Osgood, 1992), and alternative perspectives. These supplements may also be excluded in order to give specific attention to the hypothesis that a verbal story, alone, would be effective. Learners, however, are required to transfer learning from a verbal form to performance on a symbolic test, thus contributing to a possible "extraneous cognitive load" which may occur when competing sources of information forms are introduced within a single instructional event (Chandler & Sweller, 1991).

Stories can also vary in length, depth, salience, and complexity. Many instructional strategies embedded in stories may be presented with little depth, in combinations, and with little salience. Additional salience of the formal features of computer-based instruction may include reinforcing graphics, sound, and pictures. In some cases, the overlap of audio and visual material reinforces learning (Baggett, 1984). The fact that a story may treat so many strategies quickly and with little depth or salience may add to the complexity of the instruction as a reading task. This may also present the task to learners as too challenging, or unattainable. Heightened feelings of frustration or anxiety during the task itself may diminish a learner's mathematics performance (Hart & Walker, 1993).

Other parts of a story may be designed to model characters gaining self-efficacy in conjunction with learning mental computation strategies. The level of depth for modeling, however, may be of short duration and little depth in order to meet the overall treatment length in question.

Instructional stories may present all mathematics calculations in verbal form in order to concentrate specifically on the hypothesis that story-based learning could be an effective tool. We do not yet know whether the combination of verbal and symbolic presentation of the calculations within stories may have a positive effect on learning. Nor do we know whether the addition of length, depth, salience, or reduced complexity may aid learning or serve as a self-efficacy generator. Variations of these embellishments may serve as reasonable lines of further research.

Anderson, R. C., Spiro, R. J., & Anderson, M. C. (1978). Schemata as Scaffolding for the Representation of Information in Connected Discourse, American Educational Research Journal, 15(3), 433-440.

Anderson, Spiro, and Anderson (1978) conducted an experiment to test whether text is better interpreted—that is, learned and recalled—in story structure form. Two story passages were created in two contexts: One involved dining at a fancy resturaunt and the other shopping in a supermarket. It was hypothesized that the restaurant context would provide more structure, due to the natural temporal order of appetizers, main course, and dessert, and would therefore be more effectively interpreted. Participants were 75 college students randomly assigned to read either passage followed by a posttest recalling food items, food order, and character names situated in the passages. All actors and most food items in the passages were identical. Posttest results supported the hypothesis that the restaurant context significantly predicted better recall of food items. The restaurant context also significantly enabled better recall of characters attributed to certain food items. The order of presentation of food items, however, was not significant. Results of this study support the long-held notion that context schemata significantly aid the interpretation of textual information; that is, situations in which the presentation of information occurs in a natural way is a worthwhile aid to learning.