Study: 90083

Practice Guide

Review Details

Reviewed: April 2022

No statistically significant positive
findings

Meets WWC standards with reservations

For:

Practice Guide (findings for Storytelling and story-acting)

Using:

Rating:

Meets WWC standards with reservations because it is a compromised cluster randomized controlled trial, but it satisfies the baseline equivalence requirement for the individuals in the analytic intervention and comparison groups.

This review may not reflect the full body of research evidence for this intervention.

Evidence Tier rating based solely on this study. This intervention may achieve a higher tier when combined with the full body of evidence.

Findings

Language outcomes—Indeterminate effect found for the domain
Outcome measure	Comparison	Period	Sample	Intervention mean	Comparison mean	Significant?	Improvement index	Evidence tier
Expressive Vocabulary Test	Storytelling and story-acting vs. Business as usual	0 Days	Full sample; 137 students	44.78	44.73	No	--
Adaptation of Test of Narrative Language	Storytelling and story-acting vs. Business as usual	0 Days	Full sample; 130 students	24.00	22.84	No	--

Social-Emotional Learning outcomes—Indeterminate effect found for the domain
Outcome measure	Comparison	Sample	Intervention mean	Comparison mean	Significant?	Improvement index
Peer Play Assessment: Interaction	Storytelling and story-acting vs. Business as usual	Full sample; 112 students	3.85	2.85	No	--
Peer Play Assessment: Play Disruption	Storytelling and story-acting vs. Business as usual	Full sample; 112 students	1.53	2.02	No	--
Peer Play Assessment: Play Disconnection	Storytelling and story-acting vs. Business as usual	Full sample; 112 students	0.97	0.64	No	--

Evidence Tier rating based solely on this study. This intervention may achieve a higher tier when combined with the full body of evidence.

Sample Characteristics

Characteristics of study sample as reported by study author.

Female: 50%
Male: 50%
Urban
- B
- A
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Northeast

Race
Black		23%
Other or unknown		31%
White		46%

Ethnicity
Hispanic		23%
Not Hispanic or Latino		77%

Study Details

Setting

The study took place in ten classrooms of six preschool centers that were part of a child care/preschool organization serving low-income children from diverse ethnic backgrounds in a medium-sized urban area in the northeastern United States.

Study sample

The two hundred sixteen participating children ranged from three to five years old (though almost all were three and four year-olds) with a mean age of roughly fifty months. Roughly half were male, forty-six percent were White (non-Hispanic), twenty-three percent were Black, and thirty-one percent were another race. Twenty-three percent identified as Hispanic and eight percent were bilingual (English and Spanish). More than half (fifty-five percent) were eligible for free Head Start tuition.

Intervention Group

All participating classrooms provided full-time, full-year, preschool education and care for a minimum of six and a half hours per day, five days per week, fifty-two weeks per year. Throughout the entire school year, the intervention classrooms implemented storytelling and story-acting practice (STSA), a structured preschool practice exemplifying child-centered, play-based, and constructivist approaches in early childhood education that can operate as a curriculum module in conjunction with a variety of different preschool curricula, which was the scope and focus of the intervention as implemented in the study. Specifically, the STSA curriculum module implemented in the study’s intervention classrooms consisted of an activity that combines storytelling and story-acting (also described as story dictation and dramatization) developed by the teacher and writer Vivian Paley (1990). The storytelling part of the STSA took place during “choice time” when children were free to engage in different activities. The teacher or a research assistant wrote down verbatim the stories dictated by each child in a single class “storybook” with minimal intervention (clarification questions were allowed). Each child was allowed to dictate the story of their choosing though there was a limit of one page per story to allow as many children as possible to be accommodated each day. After completing the story, the child first chose which character they wanted to play and then picked other children in the classroom to act in other roles for the story-acting portion of the STSA. The story-acting portion of the STSA took place during group time and was always led by the classroom teacher. During this time, all stories dictated by children during that day were read aloud and enacted in the order dictated. All children in the intervention classrooms participated in the storytelling and story-acting parts of the implemented STSA curriculum module.

Comparison Group

Support for implementation

Prior to the introduction of the intervention, teachers and their aides in intervention classrooms were trained as a group for two hours in carrying out the intervention and received a detailed guidance manual. Classrooms in both study conditions received visits twice a week by teams of two trained research assistants (typically a graduate and undergraduate student in psychology) who assisted carrying out the intervention in the intervention classrooms, or normal classroom activities in the comparison classrooms. The research assistants took field notes during their visits to monitor classroom activities to provide further input and training as needed to maintain implementation fidelity of the intervention.

Using a narrative-and play-based activity to promote low-income preschoolers’ oral language, emergent literacy, and social competence. [Storytelling and story-acting vs. business as usual (Creative Curriculum)]