IRICE   05408
INSTITUTO ROSARIO DE INVESTIGACIONES EN CIENCIAS DE LA EDUCACION
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
TELL ME A STORY. PREESCHOLERS CONSTRUCT NARRATIVES FROM PICTURES
Autor/es:
PERALTA, OLGA; MAREOVICH, FLORENCIA
Lugar:
Ámsterdam
Reunión:
Congreso; 48th Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society; 2018
Institución organizadora:
Jean Piaget Society
Resumen:
Transmission and construction stories are very valuable activities in western culture. Many researchers have explored picture book interaction during childhood (Fletcher & Reese, 2005; DeBaryshe, 1993; Huebner, 2000; Ninio & Bruner, 1978; Peralta de Mendoza, 1995; Peralta & Salsa; 2001). Also, there are a lot of studies interested in learning during book interaction (e.g., Ganea, Allen, Butler, Carey & DeLoache, 2009; Ganea, Bloom Pickard, & DeLoache, 2008; Ganea, Ma & DeLoache, 2011; Tare, Chiong, Ganea & DeLoache, 2010; Mareovich & Peralta, 2016; Mareovich, Taverna & Peralta, 2015). Those researches were focused on book structure and picture characteristics. The results showed that using more realistic book for teaching is crucial for toddlers and preschoolers. For example, using anthropomorphic stories and pictures have a detrimental effect when four and five years-old children have to learn new information about animals (Ganea, Canfield, Simons-Ghafari, & Chou, 2014). Also, the use of realistic stories helps preschoolers to comprehend causality (Walker, Ganea & Gopnik, 2015). In sum, it seems that it is better to present the information in a realistic and direct way to transmit children different kind of information about the world. Those findings are very important because so many children's stories have no real structure, presenting characters and situations that are not common in real life. The main goal of the present work was to find out if the realistic pictures would benefit story construction by children as well. While narrative construction by children has been deeply studied (e.g., Alam & Rosemberg, 2015; Auza-Benavides, 2013; Bruner, 1986; Carmiol, & Sparks, 2014; Hess & Prado, 2013; Küntay, 2009) we did not find works which explore narrative construction from different kind of pictures. In this study, we present to preschoolers a set of six pictures. We designed two different sets: realistic pictures and nonrealistic pictures. In the realistic pictures people with animals were shown. These characters developed real life activities. In the non-realistic pictures, animal with anthropomorphic characteristic appeared. Forty nine children participated in the study. Children were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: realistic pictures (25 children, 13 girls, 12 boys, age range 5.5 to 6.1 years, M= 5.8) and non- realistic pictures (23 children, 15 girls, 8 boys, age range 5.5 to 6.2 years, M=5.6). Two children were excluded due to failure to complete the procedure. Children were recruited from different kindergartens from a large city of Argentina. All participants came from middle-class families. The procedure for the two conditions consisted in presenting a set of pictures to the children (non- realistic pictures or realistic pictures by condition) and asking them to construct a story. Children worked alone with the experimenter in a quiet room. First, the experimenter talked with children about stories and books. Then, she presented the set of picture and said: See those pictures! You can order them and tell me a story, shall you? The child ordered the pictures and then constructed a story. The interaction was audio recorded. We analyzed children?s productions and pictures order. Two different persons classified the production in two categories: description or narrative; the classification had an acceptable agreement (Kappa ≥ .80). In the descriptions children talked about the pictures, but they did not link the pictures in order to construct a story. In contrast, narratives showed an integrated production, which had a start, a conflict, and a resolution or an emotional status change. Then, we analyzed the sequence of the pictures. The resulted showed that 17 preschoolers (74%) in non- realistic picture condition constructed narratives integrating all the pictures. Two children (17%) described the pictures in an isolated way, and three children (9%) made no production. Concerning the pictures order, this group of children clearly detected a start picture and an ending one. Also, they put in the middle a picture which showed a conflict (sad or worried animals). The realistic picture group constructed descriptions (80%, 20 participants), and only a few children made a story (20%, 5 participant). In relation to pictures order we found significant differences between conditions (X^2 (6,N=49)=3.64,p> .05). While participants in the non-realistic picture condition usually put the conflict picture in the middle and the ending picture for closing, children in realistic condition organized pictures randomly. These results reflect that non-realistic pictures would be better to improve child narratives abilities. By contrast, previous work showed that realistic pictures were better means of learning. This discrepancy could be explained by the different cognitive process involved in learning and constructing narratives. While for learning it is very important to make a mapping between the new information and the real world, for creating a story children may have to take a distance from reality. So, if pictures are less similar to reality it is easier to establish a distance. This issue has to be more explored in futures studies. This kind of research could help for choosing and designing materials for improving cognitive abilities in children, not only at school but also at home.