Telling Insect Tales: Assessing the Effectiveness of Educational Stories

The use of stories as an educational tool to teach sciences has been investigated. We describe how we proceeded to write a book of five educational stories dealing with different aspects of insect life. Each story was constructed so as to be correct from a scientific, albeit imaginary, point of view, illustrated with drawings suitable for children but also rigorously scientific and supplemented with educational pages, where the scientific concepts, which the children should have spontaneously acquired while reading the story, were specified in clear, age appropriate language. The results of learning, using the book, were verified in primary school classes in Italy, with pupils aged 8, 9, and 10. Record forms respectively relating to stories and educational pages were prepared. They were intended to ascertain if major scientific concepts of the stories had been acquired, if children could transfer the concept learned from each story to other animals, whether children had used any previous knowledge, and the associations they had made. The results achieved and, in particular, the problems encountered by children with text interpretation and learning procedure are discussed. Based on these results, some suggestions are given to construct and use educational stories for teaching science. It is concluded that this tool requires collaboration among researchers in scientific subjects relevant to the concepts that have to be conveyed, educationalists, teachers and other professionals that know the school situation.