New Delhi: Remember Panchtantra stories that always had a moral in the end? Well, ancient Indian gurus knew thousands of years ago that stories are not just for entertainment, they are effective tool for teaching. A new UK-based study now corroborates this much.
Researchers at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath found during a randomised controlled trial that children learn about evolution more effectively when engaged through stories read by the teacher, than through doing tasks to demonstrate the same concept.
Professor Laurence Hurst, Director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath, who led the study said, “We were really surprised by the results – we expected that pupils would be more engaged with an activity rather than listening to a story, and that children would identify more strongly with the human-based examples of evolution than the somewhat abstract example of trilobites, but in fact the opposite was true.”
Significantly, the findings go against educational orthodoxy that states that a pupil-centred approach to learning, using human-based examples with which children can easily identify, should yield the best results.
The scientists investigated several different methods of teaching evolution in primary schools, to test whether a pupil-centred approach (where pupils took part in an activity) or a teacher-centred approach (where pupils were read a story by the teacher), led to a greater improvement in understanding of the topic.
They also looked at whether using human-based examples of evolution (comparing arm bones in humans with those in animals), or more abstract examples that were harder to emotionally engage with (comparing the patterns of trilobites), produced better results in terms of the children’s understanding of evolution.
Whilst all the methods improved the pupils’ understanding of evolution, the study found that the story-based approach combined with the abstract examples of evolution were the most effective lessons.
The study recruited 2500 primary school students who were tested for understanding of evolutionary concepts before and after the lessons.
The study has been published in the journal Science of Learning
