Classroom storytelling: using instructor narratives to increase student recall, affect, and attention

This quasi-experiment examined how incorporating an instructor narrative into teaching augmented students’ recall, affect, and sustained attention. One hundred and ninety-four undergraduate students were assigned to one of two teaching conditions in a college classroom: a lecture that included an instructor narrative summarizing the lesson’s key points (treatment) or the same lecture that utilized comparable examples instead, reviewing the lesson’s key points (control). Results indicated that students in the narrative lecture condition liked the instructor more and indicated they were likely to take a future course with the instructor. In addition, students in the narrative condition reported more sustained attention toward the lecture and performed slightly better on a test of short-term recall compared with students in the examples condition. Finally, students also performed better on a retention test of extraneous information, suggesting that instructor narratives serve a double-edged function by facilitating student recall about course content, but at the expense of students remembering more extraneous information and adding to their overall cognitive load.