Use of a storytelling context to improve girls' and boys' geometry skills in kindergarten

Abstract

Two studies investigated the effects of a storytelling-context for teaching geometry skills to kindergarten girls and boys. In Study 1, the story+geometry intervention consisted of an adventure story teaching geometry through part-whole-relations puzzles. Learning was assessed through transfer of skills, using a pre-/post design comparing intervention and control groups. A near-transfer task included new puzzle-problems with the same puzzle-pieces as the intervention, and a far-transfer task used a wider variety of puzzle-pieces. In Study 1, using diverse suburban students from a lower–middle-class-community, boys improved independent of intervention/control condition on the near-transfer task, whereas girls showed greater improvement with the intervention, than without it. No effects of condition or sex were found on far transfer. Study 2 compared two types of interventions (storytelling+geometry versus geometry-alone) to determine effectiveness of a storytelling-context separate from geometry-content. Findings for the Study 2 sample of diverse kindergartners from a high-poverty urban community showed that storytelling-contexts were more effective than de-contextualized formats for learning geometry across both near- and far-transfer tasks. Across studies, girls benefited more than boys from the geometry-content interventions (both with and without a story context).