Best Practice

The stories we tell: Using story to help students remember

Pedagogy
Storytelling can be incredibly powerful. In this four-part series, Matt Bromley considers how we can use story to improve our teaching and curriculum delivery. In part three, he explores using stories to help students’ memorisation and pique curiosity

In the first instalment of this four-part series, I argued that there are six ways of using story and storytelling in our teaching. These are:

Last week, I focused on how to use stories to organise the curriculum and structure lessons. In part three this week, let’s turn to the second and third purposes of storytelling in teaching…

 

SecEd Series: The stories we tell

 

To aide memorisation

Stories are easy to remember. In one study (Graesser et al, 1994), subjects listened to a set of stories and expository texts. Their memory was later tested and subjects remembered about 50% more from the stories than they did from the expository passages.

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