Once upon a time, there was some interesting new research into how stories interact with memory and comprehension. Telling stories is a vital part of our lived experience. Stories help us to make sense of a complex world by offering us the scaffolding of familiar structures, characters and plots.

From being held in the arms of a loved one and read to as a young child to kicking back with a great yarn as an adult, we all instinctively recognise the power of stories.

But what does research have to say about it? Early this year, Raymond A Mar and colleagues undertook a large meta-analysis, gathering studies involving over 33,000 participants, titled “Memory and comprehension of narrative versus expository texts”.

They sought to explore the evidence about how narrative texts compare with “exposition” texts - that is, non-fiction, usually informational texts, such as textbook chapters and essays - in terms of the ease with which readers can understand and recall information.

Overall, they found that readers found story texts easier to understand than the likes of expository essays, and also found stories easier to recall. Why is this? Almost all of us are exposed to stories early. As such, we develop a strong mental model for the well-connected beginnings, middles and ends of story structures, of character types and common plot dilemmas.

Exposition texts, on the other hand, contain structures that are simply less familiar to many of us. This makes them less predictable which, in turn, makes them more challenging to understand.

This has an obvious implication for much of the reading that takes place in the classroom. Texts such as worksheets or textbooks are informational texts - and will therefore be more difficult for students to understand, at least at first.

This plays out in the results of international reading assessments. The 2016 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, which compares the reading performance of more than 50 countries, found that English pupils “show superior performance on texts with literary purposes than those with informational purposes”.

Further to this, I would speculate that at least some of those pupils who struggle to make the academic leap from primary to secondary school could be finding it hard to cope with the dominance of expository texts at key stage 3 and beyond.

But what can teachers do about this? Obviously we can’t use story texts in every lesson but I do believe there is scope to make use of them in every subject.

History teaching expert Christine Counsell has studied how chronology, and cause and effect, can be explored more effectively through stories in the history classroom. Indeed, she argues that the whole history curriculum should be viewed as an interconnected narrative. Stories can also be used to better explain abstract scientific concepts. For example, research suggests that teaching evolution through narrative-based texts is more effective than teaching the concept using exposition texts.

All of this doesn’t mean that simply inserting a story into a lesson will automatically make it a success. But it does mean that storytelling should be considered part of the repertoire of every teacher, from early years foundation stage to secondary biology.

The end.

Alex Quigley is national content manager at the Education Endowment Foundation. He is a former teacher and the author of Closing the Reading Gap, published by Routledge

This article originally appeared in the 6 August 2021 issue under the headline “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story”