Explaining the moral of the story
Open accessAbstract
Although storybooks are often used as pedagogical tools for conveying moral lessons to children, the ability to spontaneously extract "the moral" of a story develops relatively late. Instead, children tend to represent stories at a concrete level - one that highlights surface features and understates more abstract themes. Here we examine the role of explanation in 5- and 6-year-old children's developing ability to learn the moral of a story. Two experiments demonstrate that, relative to a control condition, prompts to explain aspects of a story facilitate children's ability to override salient surface features, abstract the underlying moral, and generalize that moral to novel contexts. In some cases, generating an explanation is more effective than being explicitly told the moral of the story, as in a more traditional pedagogical exchange. These findings have implications for moral comprehension, the role of explanation in learning, and the development of abstract reasoning in early childhood.
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Children are most effective at extracting moral stories when prompted to explicitly explain the causal models embedded in the stories.
“Children are most effective at extracting these moral stories when prompted to explicitly explain the causal models embedded in the stories (Walker & Lombrozo, 2017).”
From Stories in Action. (2022) · cites this paper as Walker & Lombrozo, 2017
The conclusion (p. 10) says that prompts to explain key story events significantly helped 5- and 6-year-olds extract a moral lesson. The study prompted explanations of events, not explicit explanations of embedded causal models; it also does not establish that this approach is generally the most effective. (LLM, conf=0.85)
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Walsh, J., Vaida, N., Coman, A., & Fiske, S. T. (2022) · Psychological Science in the Public Interest · doi:10.1177/15291006231161337 · Cited by 26 · see citing works
“17 People use stories to teach children how to read (Price & Kalil, 2019), as scaffolding to impart lessons on norms and morality (Baumeister et al., 2004; Walker & Lombrozo, 2017), and to explain how the natural world works (Dahlstrom, 2014).”
Background
- Authors
- Walker, C. M., & Lombrozo, T.
- Affiliations
- University of California San Diego (US)
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- Corresponding author
- Walker, Caren M.
- Venue
- Cognition
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2017-10
- Volume
- 167
- Pages
- 266-281
- ISSN
- 0010-0277 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2565207627
- Cited by
- 71
- References
- 3
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 13 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 2
- FWCI
- 13.26
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Cognition (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (DRL-1056712)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
- Keywords
- moral reasoning, moral tales, explanation, children's moral development, abstract thinking, narrative comprehension, surface features, early childhood, moral education
- MeSH terms
- Child, Child Development, Psychology, Child, Child, Preschool, Concept Formation, Female, Humans, Male, Morals, Reading, Comprehension
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