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Influence of Reader Testimony With Storytelling on Children’s Learning
Aubrey Clayton
Faculty Advisor: Jacqueline Woolley, PhD
A tool used in religious communities to tell stories and cultivate understanding of unbelief in the unseen (eg., God, angels, divine intervention) is testimony. A religious testimony is a personal oral story about one’s experience with God. Testimony could be helpful as children are beginning to develop skills in deciphering which parts of a story apply to reality and which parts are fantasy, but there is little research on this possibility. This study set out to examine children’s learning outcomes (moral comprehension and detail recall) when told a testimony after different genres of read aloud stories. It was hypothesized that children’s learning outcomes of stories will improve when testimony is employed to highlight the moral takeaway of the story when compared to when there is no testimony given. Additionally, it was hypothesized that the expected benefits of testimony inclusion will be less prevalent for learning assessments of reality-based stories because there is less need for an aid in discerning the moral of a story and its application in a realistic context. Results are limited in their piloting phase, but data collection with current study design will continue until a large enough sample size is obtained. The results of this study inform future research on how children learn from storybooks, the effects of testimonials on children’s cognition, and expansion into investigating the efficacy of other religious storytelling aids in non-religious contexts.