Teaching elementary school students to identify story themes.

Abstract

An instructional program focused on story theme was administered to 2nd and 3rd graders (high-, average-, and low-achieving students, including some with disabilities) in a high-poverty school.Compared with more traditional instruction, the program improved theme comprehension and the identification of instructed themes when they appeared in new stories. However, the program did not help students apply a theme to real-life situations or identify and apply noninstructed themes. Findings indicated that at-risk children (at all achievement levels, including those with disabilities) were able to achieve some degree of abstract, higher order comprehension when given instruction that combined structured lessons, a strategy, and discussion.

Be Kind to Three-Legged Dogs: Children's Literal Interpretations of TV's Moral Lessons

“…Dorfman and Brewer (1994) examined undergraduates' ability to derive moral themes from fables and argued that readers must attend to the central event and the outcome, and given the combination of the two, make a judgment (or inference) about the value of such events. Williams et al (2002) expanded on this model and argued that readers not only have to attend to the event and the outcome and make a judgment, but must also go beyond the specifics of a story to make a generalization. Similarly, Narvaez et al (1999) suggested that in order to successfully understand a moral theme, the individual must integrate the intention-action-outcome chains of events to derive a message, remember the message, put it into words, and make a generalization.…”

“…Similarly, Whitney, Vozzola, and Hofmann (2005) found that fourth through sixth graders, seventh through twelfth graders, and undergraduates and graduate students had different perceptions of the moral attributes of characters in the Harry Potter series. Williams et al (2002) examined whether extensive training could teach 8-to 9-year olds to extract moral themes from stories. Before the 14 weeks of in-class training, virtually none of the students could state the theme of a story they had just heard.…”

Cognitive hypothesis testing and response to intervention for children with reading problems

“…While lower level processes such as decoding, word recognition, and explicit comprehension are likely the province of the left posterior regions, higher level implicit or inductive comprehension skills require fluid reasoning (Gf ) and right-hemisphere functions (e.g., Bryan & Hale, 2001;Hale & Fiorello, 2004;Rourke, 1994). Children with right-hemisphere dysfunction are unlikely to show reading comprehension problems in the early grades, when the meaning in text is explicit and concrete, but they struggle with higher level or implicit comprehension (Bryan & Hale, 2001;Rourke, 1994;Williams et al, 2002). Although Gc is most likely related to temporal lobe functions, the frontal executive-working memory system is responsible for Glr, with encoding being a left frontal task (in combination with the hippocampus) and retrieval a right frontal one (Tulving, Kapur, Craik, Moscovitch, & Houle, 1994).…”

Narrative Skills of Youth with Down Syndrome: a Comprehensive Literature Review

“…According to Williams et al (2002), understanding a story's theme involves 'going beyond the story' to make general value judgments (e.g., BStealing is bad^) or observations (e.g., BSome people steal^). In studies involving individuals with DS, theme has been defined more narrowly as simply the central problem of the story (Reilly et al 1990).…”