Perspective: Learning through stories
By Christopher Stevens
What do you think of when you hear the word “storytelling”? For me, storytelling conjures memories of sitting around a campfire or listening to older relatives’ stories at family meals.
Storytelling is by no means a new concept. Stories have been used as tools to transfer information and understanding between humans for millennia, and play an important role in many aspects of life, including learning and education. When I taught high school, I found myself intuitively using storytelling to communicate learning ideas to my students — from explaining the background and reason for a specific scientific discovery to encouraging students to find their own stories of how science explains the world around them.
Since joining MIT Open Learning as a Digital Learning Lab fellow with the MIT Department of Biology, I have rediscovered the importance of using storytelling to more effectively teach and assess learning, especially in our online courses. I have been able to dive further into the research behind why stories make effective educational tools, and a lot of it has to do with triggering more efficient memory storage and retrieval. If you are interested in reading more into this, I’d recommend reading through this article by educational psychologist John Sweller.
Using storytelling to engage adult learners
One of my main projects at the Digital Learning Lab has been updating assessments in our 7.00x Introduction to Biology — The Secret of Life course. My goal is to capture learners’ attention and connect topics to their existing experience, to highlight the importance and relevance of what they are learning. This can be challenging in online courses that cater to adult learners, who enter with lots of pre-existing experiences and have a wide variety of backgrounds and goals for taking the course. Along with the existing research on this, our team has found that using storytelling in assessment and content creation is effective at accomplishing this goal.
While there are many ways to incorporate storytelling into an assessment, I chose to start with a relatively easy adjustment to the first assignment in the course. Previously, this biochemistry-focused assignment had a series of interesting but unconnected questions that jumped from topic to topic. In the updated assignment, I decided on one theme to focus all the questions around. I chose urea, a notable component of urine.
By choosing a specific focus and theme for the assessment, I highlighted the application of the varied content found in the biochemistry unit and related it to everyday experiences that a learner would have. Each question builds off the previous and assesses the learner’s full understanding of the unit topics, but in a way that connects them all and relates the content to the learner’s life. For example, many previous learners in this course have mentioned taking the course to learn more about genetic diseases due to a recent diagnosis in their family, so part of the urea story includes a genetic disorder associated with urea metabolism.
Building on a storytelling approach
As it turns out, and as our group has found in other courses, learners respond very positively to our use of storytelling! A learner survey on the recent biochemistry assignment changes showed that learners noticed the connection between problems and felt more engaged and confident in working through the assignment. While we know that storytelling in education is backed by research, nothing is more important than ensuring that learners are finding our methods effective.
I am currently working on updating more assignments in this course to follow a larger narrative, continuing from the urea story, and encouraged by the positive student responses. We want students to see the connections between all of the course units, and by continuing the narrative, this can be more effectively highlighted for the learners. As a note, our team has had great success implementing similar course-wide narratives, such as in our 7.05x Biochemistry: Biomolecules, Methods, and Mechanisms course!
Overall, our team has found storytelling incredibly helpful in achieving our goals of creating more engaging and realistic assessments and content in our online courses. I have found stories particularly helpful in my ongoing updates to 7.00x. Implementing storytelling helps me consider and emphasize the important learning goals, and learners appreciate these efforts.
Christopher Stevens is a digital learning teaching fellow in MIT Open Learning’s Digital Learning Lab.
Perspective: Learning through stories was originally published in MIT Open Learning on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.