Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin. Story time may be among the things you’d least expect to find in a science class. But when Lewis Stewart, director of innovation and research at Sir William Stanier School in Crewe, Cheshire, and science lead for the Learning Alliance multi-academy trust, realised that his students’ working memories were being overloaded with complicated ideas, he and his colleagues turned to the power of stories to simplify things. Stewart explains how they did it.

Tes: This project began with the identification of some common issues across science lessons. What were they?

Lewis Stewart: There are often instances in chemistry - as well as in other subjects - when our students are required to commit multiple stages in a process to memory. Often, such processes require our students to hold multiple “interacting elements” in their working memory at any given time.

When we ask students to explain how two elements can chemically combine in an ionic bond, for example, they must consider the electron structure for each element, how many electrons may be transferred, what effect this has on the atom’s charge and the properties of the new compound formed.

You can see how this might overwhelm students, and, quite often, such tasks did.

We identified a further problem, which was that a lot of our explanations and modelling in science had to be delivered at a distance from the students and in rooms unsuitable for many science demonstrations. Therefore, we had to consider a way of improving the quality of our explanations and modelling of abstract concepts without exceeding our students’ working memory capacity.

What sort of impact was this having on students?

Whenever a challenge is set too high or when our students lack the required prior knowledge to manage incoming information, we risk damaging their perceptions of their own competence or providing negative learning experiences that may leave them feeling less motivated.

Our school is situated in a disadvantaged area, and some of our students have low levels of resilience. But while we hope to leave them feeling successful after every lesson, we cannot shy away from delivering the more rigorous and challenging aspects of our science curriculum. Delivering this “powerful knowledge”, which takes our students beyond their lived experience, is our duty as their teachers and offers the greatest chance of increasing their opportunities.

What made you think about storytelling as a possible remedy?

When I taught the history of the atom, I explained to students how physicist Ernest Rutherford’s desk at the University of Manchester still remains irradiated to this day, as a result of the experiments he conducted into nuclear physics.

I worried that I would be wasting time telling this story but found that it struck a chord with students.

As a result, their knowledge proved to be more durable, something that was evident in retrieval quizzing later. I realised that it was the story that had helped to enforce meaning and made Rutherford’s alpha-scattering experiment more memorable.

How did you develop this idea further?

After reading literature from Daniel Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, I thought the durability of my students’ knowledge might have been the result of the “privileged status of story in memory” (Willingham, 2004). Literature suggests that anchoring new ideas in stories may increase motivation and provide a strong base for students to return to if they later forget (Pashler et al, 2007).

Research from the past 30 years suggests that stories are specially placed in our memories and are referred to as “psychologically privileged”. Such stories contain the “four Cs” :

• Causality: related events in a story.
• Conflict: obstacles preventing a goal from being met.
• Complications: new problems that must be solved.
• Characters: observing characters in action.

When implementing stories in my classroom, I had to carefully consider the degree of causality and the level of inferences my students must make.

Evidence suggests that stories with medium-level inferences are most accurately recalled (Keenan et al, 1984). Therefore, developments in the story must be sequenced to ensure that students can draw their own connections between related events.

Willingham (2004) proposes that stories provide a non-threatening and interesting introduction to new concepts.

So, how does this work in practice?

If the intended knowledge is difficult to model - and is abstract, with lots of interacting elements - a story may be useful.

If the knowledge contains a series of events or stages in a process, influencing one another in turn, then a story with high causality may support students in recalling each stage. For example, we made a magnesium atom into a character who was tired of carrying around two extra electrons: this represented the conflict and created a goal for the story.

Another character, a fluorine atom, offered a solution to the goal by offering to take an electron from magnesium.

A complication was then introduced: the fluorine atom could only take one of magnesium’s electrons.

However, the solution of fluorine’s twin brother arriving and offering to take an electron provided a memorable solution to the problem.

The causal events in the story made each step in the process explicit and memorable.

If the knowledge requires students to evaluate, compare or contrast ideas, the story should be adapted.

When students were tasked with comparing processes of purifying water, they recalled more of the stages in each process - and their respective advantages and disadvantages - when we had a character set in a familiar location, trialling each method and facing challenges along the way.

It is also important to note that students must be invested in the story’s characters, enveloping them in the inquiry process.

To achieve this, the teacher may consider making the conflict and complications “affectively charged” - ie, capturing topics that are emotionally relevant to students, such as those about family, friends and identity formation (Isabelle, 2007).

What sort of response have you seen from students so far?

After introducing stories into our science curriculum over multiple groups, we observed an increase in students’ performance on extended response questions relating to each story and increased performance on independent practice questions. Students retrieved stories with an accuracy of 87 per cent after a delay.

Six months on from story one, students in Year 10 can still fully explain ionic bonds between elements. In an end-of-unit assessment, every student successfully explained the ionic bond between two atoms.

Although our stories were only recently introduced - and more rigorous studies should be conducted before making any firm claims of their success - the early indications suggest that storytelling in science is improving student retrieval and performance in extended answer questions.

Lewis Stewart is director of innovation and research at Sir William Stanier School in Crewe, Cheshire, and science lead for the Learning Alliance multi-academy trust. He tweets @_LewisStewart

This article originally appeared in the 7 May 2021 issue under the headline “How I...Use storytelling to teach science”