fairfolio
Saved Projects

Tell Me a Story: The Effects of Storytelling vs. Story-Reading on the Executive Functions of Fourth Graders

ISEF · 2022 Behavioral and Social Sciences Third Award

Bachmann, Edith · Byram Hills High School

Is this your project?

Overview

Executive functions (EFs) are key skills linked to academic and life-long success, helping individuals respond appropriately to different situations. They include paying attention, maintaining self-control, and working memory (WM). Finding ways to improve EFs is critical and many possible approaches, including storytelling, have yet to be explored. This study investigated the impact of a storytelling intervention for fourth graders through weekly interactive video sessions over 6 weeks. Five pairs of students read or told stories to one another. In the storytelling condition, they prioritized looking at the listener and never showed the pictures accompanying a story; thus the listener had to work to hold the story details in mind and sustain attention without illustrations to aid them. In the story-reading condition, the same stories were used but the student reading the story showed the accompanying illustration to the listener as each page was read. WM, inhibitory control, and language skills were assessed before and after the intervention. Each session, both members of every pair took turns sharing one story and listening to their partner. The storytelling group showed a trend of greater improvement in tasks requiring auditory sustained attention and comprehension while the story-reading group demonstrated greater improvement in WM, visual sustained attention, and vocabulary. On one WM task, story-readers made significantly fewer errors (Mann-Whitney U = 1.500, p < 0.05). This study is a fundamental step toward providing educators with the tools and necessary knowledge to create students prepared for success in the classroom and the world beyond.

Working on something like this? See what's been done and what's still open.

Awards (1)

Competition history

  • ISEF 2022 Behavioral and Social Sciences · Entry BEHA041 · Atlanta, Georgia, United States Affiliated fair in NY, United States of America

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Report a problem

Source: Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google