Pretesting Promotes Theme Extraction but Not Generalization From Moral Stories in Young Children.
Although adults commonly tell moral stories to children with the aim of teaching important lessons, they often fail to extract the intended moral themes of these stories. Few interventions to date have successfully addressed this problem. The present study examined the effects of pretesting on child...
| Publicado en: | Developmental Psychology Vol. 62; no. 6; pp. 1236 - 1250 |
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| Autores principales: | , , , |
| Formato: | Artículo |
| Publicado: |
American Psychological Association
Jun2026
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=193458014&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 193458014 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00121649 DPS jtl: Developmental Psychology issn: 00121649 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Jun2026 vid: 62 iid: 6 pid: 34 pub: American Psychological Association artinfo: ui: 193458014 10.1037/dev0002005 ppf: 1236 ppct: 14 formats: tig: atl: Pretesting Promotes Theme Extraction but Not Generalization From Moral Stories in Young Children. aug: au: Foo, Jyh Hsien Yu, Liwen Pan, Steven C. Ding, Xiao Pan affil: Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore su: Singapore Reading Recognition (Psychology) Task performance Learning Problem solving Randomized controlled trials Ethics Attention Child development Storytelling Memory Cognition Language acquisition Children Research funding Logistic regression analysis Statistical sampling Intelligibility of speech Descriptive statistics Thematic analysis Odds ratio Educational psychology Short-term memory Visual perception Data analysis software Regression analysis sug: subj: Reading Recognition (Psychology) Task performance Learning Problem solving Randomized controlled trials Ethics Attention Child development Storytelling Memory Cognition Language acquisition Children Singapore Educational Support Services Marketing Research and Public Opinion Polling Research funding Logistic regression analysis Statistical sampling Intelligibility of speech Descriptive statistics Thematic analysis Odds ratio Educational psychology Short-term memory Visual perception Data analysis software Regression analysis keyword: cued recall moral learning pretesting effect transfer cued recall moral learning pretesting effect transfer ab: Although adults commonly tell moral stories to children with the aim of teaching important lessons, they often fail to extract the intended moral themes of these stories. Few interventions to date have successfully addressed this problem. The present study examined the effects of pretesting on children's learning from moral stories. We assigned sixty 5- to 6-year-olds to either a pretesting condition, where they attempted pretest questions about a to-be-learned moral before hearing a moral story, or a control condition, where they only heard the story. After hearing the story, pretested children were significantly more likely than the control group to generate the intended moral theme on open-ended questions asking about the story's lesson. They did not perform any better, however, on tasks that involved selecting the theme in a forced-choice format or applying it to novel scenarios. Hence, the present findings partially support the hypothesis that pretesting improves children's theme extraction from moral stories—that is, enhancing the ability to reproduce the correct theme but not enhancing generalization to other circumstances. Overall, this study reveals that pretesting can enhance the effectiveness of moral stories as an educational tool, at least in terms of helping children to learn important moral lessons, and presents directions for further research to investigate real-life applications of these lessons. Public Significance Statement: The present study investigated whether pretesting—attempting to answer questions about information one has yet to learn, followed by an opportunity to learn the correct answers—helps children learn from moral stories. Five- and 6-year-olds better recalled a moral lesson after pretesting but did not generalize it to new scenarios. Hence, pretesting can enhance moral learning from stories in young children but may not guarantee broader application of those lessons. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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