The effectiveness of storytelling education on elementary students' creativity and verbal development

The purpose of the current research was to investigate the effect of storytelling teaching on the creativity and verbal development of primary school students. This research was a semi-experimental research with a pre-test and post-test design with a control group. The statistical population used in this research is the college of primary school students of Zavareh city in the academic year 1400-1401, whose number was equal to 1161 people. The sample size in the present study was two groups of 15 people, experimental and control, which were selected through the available sampling method. Replacement of people in experimental and control groups was done based on random sampling. In order to obtain quantitative data based on research variables, Abedi's standard creativity questionnaire and Hassanzadeh and Minaei's standard verbal development questionnaire (2008) were used. In the present study, the intervention provided to the experimental group was eight sessions of 45 minutes (3 sessions per week) in the storytelling method. Analysis of the obtained data was done using spss software and covariance test. The findings of the present research have shown that teaching through storytelling increased students' creativity by 42% and their verbal growth by 53%. Based on this, it is suggested that primary school teachers use different storytelling methods in the teaching process.
Key words: storytelling, creativity, verbal development، Education
 
 
 
Introduction: Creativity is a category that has its special place in different fields. Considering that in today's world, cultivating creativity is one of the main axes of educational systems and teachers play a large role in the growth or suppression of students' creativity, educational psychologists believe that teachers can teach creative thinking methods and ways to strengthen creative abilities to people and to Especially for children and teenagers to learn.Today, various methods have been created to increase children's creativity. One of the significant artistic activities in this field is the use of the art of storytelling. Storytelling helps the development of children's mental and emotional abilities. Acquainting children with sounds, words, and language strengthens their imagination and curiosity and helps their brain development. Children distinguish between the real and imaginary world with stories, and this leads to an increase in their creativity.Based on this and considering the importance of paying attention to creativity in children on the one hand and paying attention to their verbal development on the other hand, and the effect that storytelling is likely to have on these two characteristics, further investigation in a more practical dimension in the field of the effect of storytelling on creativity And verbal development seems necessary, it is natural that investigating this issue can be influential in the field of children's education and have a decisive direction in cultivating the characteristics that influence children's creativity and verbal development. The purpose of the current research is to investigate the effect of storytelling teaching on the creativity and verbal development of primary school students.
Materials & Methods: The current research is practical in terms of purpose and semi-experimental in terms of type with a pre-test and post-test design with a control group. In order to collect data in this research, a field questionnaire was used in two phases, pre-test and post-test.In the post-test, after the storytelling sessions, the questionnaires were distributed among the experimental group. The statistical population used in this research is the college of primary school students in Zavareh city in the academic year 1400-1401, whose number is 1161 people according to the statistics obtained from the primary education department of Zavareh district education department with 20 primary schools. In order to determine the sample size in this research, random sampling method was used and the sample size is two groups of 15 people, experimental and control. In this research, Abedi's creativity questionnaire (1368) was used to measure creativity, and Hassanzadeh and Minaei's standard verbal growth questionnaire (1380) was used to measure verbal development.In order to check the validity of the creativity and verbal development questionnaire, face and content validity were used, and to measure the reliability using Cronbach's alpha method, the internal consistency for all variables and their dimensions was higher than 0.7, which shows the appropriate reliability of the tool used in the research. is ready For the intervention, questionnaires were first distributed between the two groups, and after collecting the initial questionnaires, eight 45-minute sessions (3 sessions per week) were planned for both groups. And in each session, for the experimental group, education was provided in the storytelling method, and for the control group, education was provided in the traditional way. Finally, the questionnaires were again distributed between the two groups. In order to analyze the data, SPSS version 24 statistical software was used.
Discussion & Result: In the descriptive part of this research, frequency distribution tables, cumulative frequency percentage and mean, standard deviation statistics were used, and in the inferential part, analysis of covariance was used to check the research hypotheses.The findings of the research in the descriptive part showed that the largest number of statistical samples participating in this research were boys and most of the subjects were studying in the sixth grade and the least of them were studying in the third, fourth and fifth grades. In this research, the Shapiro-Wilk test was used to investigate the distribution of the components of two creativity and verbal development questionnaires. Based on the results of this test, the scores of the components of creativity and verbal development both had a normal distribution. Examining the variance homogeneity of post-test scores in both control and experimental groups using Levin's test showed that the calculated significance levels of Levin's F confirm the null hypothesis in these scores. In the end, the results showed that teaching through storytelling increases students' creativity by 42% and their verbal growth by 53%. The findings confirmed the findings of previous researchers in this field.
Conclusion: The present study showed that teaching in the way of storytelling increases the score in the creativity components of students and Verbal development of students is effective. In line with the results of the present research, it is suggested that teachers use storytelling in their teaching process. It is also suggested that education and training should organize workshops to identify traditional storytelling methods and creative storytelling for teachers.