Research Findings
Effect of Practice on Goal Structure Identification during Children’s Narrations
The purpose of this study was to examine how well Head Start children narrated according to a goal structure.
What is a goal structure?
A narrative’s goal structure is a breakdown of story events, depicting relationships between events and the main goal. It consists of the character’s goals, attempts to achieve those goals, and the outcomes of those attempts. The figure below depicts an abbreviated example of goal structure.
Why are goal structures important?
Identifying a story’s goal structure requires understanding objectives, detecting problems, and predicting outcomes. It has been linked to better memory and better comprehension.
What did we find?
Head Start children (ages 3- to 5-years old) narrated the wordless picture book, Frog, Where Are You (Mayer,1969), once a week for four weeks. We found that 3-year-olds can identify some goals, attempts, and outcomes. By 4 years old, there was a significant increase in the amount of attempts stated in children’s narrations. By 5, children identified almost all attempts in the narrative. We concluded that the ability to successfully identify a goal structure begins with identification of attempts.
We found no significant trends in goals and outcomes identified, although it appeared that the number of goals children stated rose slightly between ages four and five. Perhaps future studies should examine 6- and 7-year-olds to determine how this trend develops. These results are displayed in the figure below.
This study involved children from low-income families that are placed at-risk for academic problems. It is important to note that our findings were similar to findings from other studies that included children from middle-income households. This suggests that 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds from low-income families have similar narrative comprehension skills as it relates to identifying the goal structure of a narrative.
Basic Language Skills and the Understanding of Causal Connections in Head-Start Children
What is Narrative Comprehension?
Narrative comprehension is the ability to understand a story. Narrative comprehension is important because it requires specialized thinking skills, it is used in everyday life, and contributes to later reading comprehension. Preschoolers were examined in this study because their narrative comprehension skills can be used to predict their reading comprehension.
Why is Narrative Comprehension important?
Understanding narratives is important for preschoolers because it can predict their reading achievement during their formal education years. Research shows that there is a relationship between narrative comprehension skills and basic language skills. Specifically, there is a relationship between children’s ability to use causal connections and their basic language skills. Additionally, their narrative comprehension skills generalize to different types of media (e.g., storybooks, television, and oral narratives).
Basic language skills may foster the development narrative comprehension skills that are important for later reading achievement. One study of preschoolers from middle-income families found that basic language skills predicted their understanding of causal connections (Brown, Lile, & Burns, 2010).
The current project seeks to examine the understanding of narrative causal connections and its relation to basic language skills in children of Head Start Programs. Understanding the development of early literacy skills of children from Head Start Programs is important as they have been shown to be at-risk for problems in reading skills (O’Conner, Arnott, McIntosh, & Dodd, 2009).
What did we find?
Our results supported our hypothesis. Children produced significantly more local connections than global connections in general, which is consistent with previous research of children from middle-income households. Because local connections were used more than global connections, children demonstrate better local comprehension than global comprehension. In other words, children were able to recall and store information that is close together better than information that is farther apart. The figure below depicts the number of Local and Global connections per time.
