Effectiveness of informative narratives: The impact of text structure, reading goals, and characteristics of the learners on the text processing and text comprehension

• Applicant: Dr. Stefanie Golke
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 452009182

Informative narratives present conceptual information embedded in a story in order to enhance the acquisition of conceptual knowledge of a topic compared with a normal expository text. Informative narratives are not only recommended in the literature but also used in practice. However, there are only few studies that investigated their effectiveness compared with expository texts and they revealed no beneficial effects. This ineffectiveness could result from the structure of informative narratives, more concretely, the way how the conceptual information is integrated into the story. Therefore, Experiment 1 investigates the basic question of how an integrated vs. non-integrated text structure of informative narratives impacts the learning of conceptual information compared with expository texts. Experiment 2 focuses on the impact of characteristics of the learners, including text-related beliefs, need for cognition, reading skill, and transportability, which are supposed to be relevant for informative narratives due to their combination of expository- and narrative-specific features. Findings from this experiment could further explain the mechanisms underlying informative narratives and they might indicate individual benefits of these texts. Experiment 3 explores the comprehension processes in order to explain the findings from Experiment 1. Another basic question is which reading goals learners activate during reading informative narratives. Thus, in Experiment 4, the reading goals entertainment and knowledge acquisition are explicitly instructed and their effects on text comprehension are compared.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Netherlands
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Halszka Jarodzka