The Effect of Teaching Approach on Third-Grade Students' Response to Literature

This study examined effects of teaching approaches on students' responses to three picture books. One hundred and twenty third-grade students were randomly assigned to treatments: literary analysis, literary experience, and no discussion. The literary-analysis approach focused on identifying and critiquing literary elements; the literary-experience approach centered on having students live through and react to the storyline. Teaching approach affected the content of students' subsequent efferent and aesthetic responses, with subjects from the literary-analysis group more likely to focus on the identification of literary elements in free written responses. Subjects from the literary-experience group wrote responses indicating more involvement in the story world, described similarities between characters and real people, and treated literature more as an aesthetic experience than a lesson or an object to be studied. Subjects who had no discussion on the stories were more likely to simply retell the story.