Effect of Historical Narrative Based Approach in Designing Secondary School Science Content on Students’ Memory Recall Performance in a School in Mumbai

Abstract

Use of Narratives for teaching science and technology at secondary school level has gained strength in recent years. Many approaches and explorations have been done by researchers like Arthur Stinner, Aaron Isabelle, Stephan Klassen and Yannis Hadzigeorgiou. With the spirit of extending existing work in domain of teaching science using narratives, a General Narrative Schema, (also known as Epistemological Narrative Schema or ENS) for describing a scientific inquiry event in context of cultural tradition of science was developed to assist secondary school science content writers in designing narratives to be used for explaining science concepts. Control group experiments were conducted with secondary school students in Mumbai to test the effect of ENS on certain aspect of science concept learning. The control group was taught using lesson from their existing text book while the Experimental group was taught the same content but modified and delivered in the Form of a Narrative designed using the Epistemological Narrative Schema. The posttest for evaluating difference in short term memory recall of students of the delivered lesson showed significant difference in the mean score of Experimental group versus the Control group. The experimental group scored significantly better than the Control group in Posttest results. This experiment strengthens the case for introducing narrative based approaches for designing science lessons at secondary school level.