Student assessment of narrative: telling stories in the classroom

ABSTRACTWe conducted this study to create a measure of instructional narratives and to validate the new instrument by assessing its construct validity. In particular, we created an item pool reflecting three aspects of instructor-told narratives including their course orientation, concreteness, and memorability. Students (N = 598) responded to a series of items measuring the three dimensions of instructional narratives and also their perceptions of instructor clarity, cognitive load, relevance, attention, and both emotional and cognitive interest. Results from exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed that a bifactor model with a general measure of effective storytelling and three subfactors fit the data well. Moreover, the new measure of instructional narratives was related to the educational outcomes noted above in a logical manner and each dimension predicted unique associations with these. In general, our results indicated that in order to teach clearly, explaining course concepts through ...