Narrative skills linked to mathematical achievement
Dr Daniela O'Neill

Dr Daniela O'Neill, of the University of Waterloo, Canada, discusses the link found in her research between early oral storytelling abilities and achievement in maths.

Maths and storytelling may seem like very different abilities, but, in a recent study, we found that pre-school children's early storytelling abilities were predictive of their mathematical achievement two years later.

Three and four-year-old children were shown a book that they had never seen before which contained only pictures (a shortened version of Mercer Mayer's Frog Goes to Dinner) and were asked to tell the story to a puppet, Ernie (a Sesame Street character). To increase the motivation for children to tell the story, we told them that Ernie had never heard the story before.

The children were not prompted in any way and were free to say as much or as little about each page as they wished. In this way, we anticipated getting the best picture of what children could accomplish on their own and, therefore, a more sensitive measure of their storytelling abilities. In this first stage of the study, we also administered a general test of language ability to children, the Test of Early Language Development - 2 (TELD-2).

Children were shown a story where a boy brings his pet frog to a restaurant and it causes all sorts of mayhem by jumping around. Seven aspects of children's storytelling ability were measured: the mean length of children's utterances; vocabulary diversity; use of conjunctions; subordinate clause use; the number of events in the story talked about; the ability to shift clearly from one character in the story to another as the action shifts; and the number of references to the mental states of characters, such as what they were thinking or feeling.

Two years later, the children were given a number of tests of academic achievement including a test of mathematical achievement. We found that children who scored highly on the mathematics test had also scored highly on certain measures of their storytelling ability two years earlier, and vice versa if they scored poorly. However, it was only certain aspects of storytelling that showed a relation with mathematical achievement, such as children's abilities to relate the events of the story; to talk about the mental states of characters; to shift clearly between characters; and to use conjunctions such as "because." In contrast, children's general level of language ability, as measured by the TELD-2, showed no relation to later mathematical performance, supporting one of the initial hypotheses that narrative ability might be more predictive of certain aspects of later academic achievement than general language ability alone.

Compared to previous studies examining links between narrative ability and later academic achievement, this study is the first to examine this relation in typically-developing children under the age of five. It is also one of few studies to employ an unprompted story-generation task and the first to specifically compare different narrative measures and to include narrative measures capturing aspects of how the storyteller conveys perspective. We believe that the relations seen in this study are partly due to the methods we used to increase the enjoyment of storytelling for the children, which provided a sensitive measure of what they could achieve on their own.

Although more research is needed, the results suggest that building strong oral storytelling skills early in the pre-school years may be helpful in preparing children for learning mathematics when they enter school. It may be beneficial to foster those aspects of storytelling in which the teller must capture the actions and perspectives of characters as they interact with each other; that is, capturing how one character's actions may lead to a reaction by the other and then this can lead to further actions and reactions, and how these actions affect what the characters may know, think, say, or feel.

These results also lend support to a theoretical argument of mathematician Keith Devlin, who suggested in his book The Math Gene that, "reasoning about mathematical relationships between mathematical (abstract) objects is no different from reasoning about … human relationships between people."

Given these findings, we will continue to explore more precisely how these two domains of thinking are related and to delve more deeply into how different aspects of storytelling ability may relate to different aspects of mathematical thinking.

References

D.K. O'Neill, M.J. Pearce and J.L. Pick (2004) Preschool children's narratives and performance on the Peabody Individualized Achievement Test - Revised: evidence of a relation between early narrative and later mathematical ability, First Language, vol. 24, pp. 149-183.

K. Devlin (2000) The math gene: how mathematical thinking evolved and how numbers are like gossip, New York: Basic Books.

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