STORY-TELLING CAN BE A VERY EFFECTIVE INSTRUCTIONAL TOOL with a wide variety of learners. Stories introduce new information in a meaningful, memorable way. Learners can then take the information and apply it to real-life situations. 

When a teacher presents course material in a narrative form, the learner is able to make meaningful connections rather than learning a list of information. 

Traditional geography classes usually have students memorize geographical points on a map. The student memorizes the points in their short-term memory just long enough to make it to the exam. Compare this to learning geography by hearing or reading stories from people who have traveled in other parts of the world. The students can make connections from the story to the geographical places through whatever aspects of the story interest them: music, clothing, religion, or food (Liston, 1994).

Stories also help students make sense of information when they are asked to write them. Writing down a story about a problem can often make a solution appear because narrative is reflexive (Reissner, 2002). 

Listening to stories makes learning more meaningful

Whether the student is writing a story or listening to a story, the use of narrative can also motivate learners. Stories add creativity and novelty. Few students are asked to be creative and write stories in a Biology class, for instance. By doing so, a sense of novelty is created (Stotz, 1998). 

Teaching, being a highly communicative process, requires good rhetorical skills on the instructor's part. One traditional way of evaluating rhetoric is by the logos, ethos, and pathos created by the speaker (Ma, 1994). The teacher gains credibility (ethos) through telling stories about their own experience. The teacher demonstrates that certain facts are true (logos) through the facts in a story. The stories also create pathos because “students are more likely to empathize or sympathize with an instructor whom they become to know as a real person through personalized episodes” (Ma, 1994).

Teachers can use stories to gain credibility

Stories are not just used in English or Public Speaking classes. Research has shown many examples of stories used to teach all types of classes from biology to geography. Most everyone remembers the word problems in math class that started out “A train leaves New York at the same time that a train leaves Chicago…” Word problems are just one example of how stories can be used as an instructional tool. The table below shows the Content-Performance matrix familiar to many in the educational field. 

Click on each content type below for a description and example of how a story might be used to teach the corresponding content.

                       Facts
                       Concepts 
                       Process
                       Procedure
                       Principle

Marjorie Old, Graduate Student
SDSU Educational Technology

Old, M. (2004). Stories as an instructional tool.

In B. Hoffman (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Technology. Retrieved July 14, 2010, from file:///D:/实验室/eet/articles/narrative/start.htm