Children choose their own stories: The impact of choice on children's learning of new narrative skills

Despite evidence that early narrative abilities are predictive of literacy skills and academic achievement, only limited progress has been made in understanding how the development of these narrative skills can be facilitated. The current study measured the effectiveness of a new narrative intervention conducted with 26 preschoolers. Children were assigned to one of two intervention conditions: An active-choice condition (able to choose story components) or a no-choice condition (story components were preselected). Both groups otherwise received the same explicit and engaging teaching of story grammar. As predicted, greater narrative skill gains were evident for the active-choice intervention; including larger gains on both central story grammar components and story information overall. Future implications for how stories might be presented to young children in order to more richly facilitate narrative skill acquisition are discussed.