Presentation at AISB'07 symposium, Culture Lab, Newcastle University, april 2007

1. AISB07 - AI and Narrative Games for Education
Newcastle 2nd-5th april 2007
Effects of Narrative Levels
on Comprehension :
Theoretical Framework and Methodology
Baptiste Campion
Université catholique de Louvain (UCL)
Groupe de Recherche en Médiation des savoirs (GReMS)
Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium)
baptiste.campion@uclouvain.be
http://www.uclouvain.be/comu/

2. General Overview
• Current PhD research led under supervision of
Pr Philippe Marion (UCL) and Daniel Peraya
(Univ. of Genève)
• Attempt to combine cognitive and narratological
approaches for studying interactive narrative
• Object: Science popularization interactive
narrative
• Current presentation: work in progress

3. Whatʼs the matter ?
• There exists different uses of narration in
educative interactive documents
• Is the educative ʻeffectʼ similar in each case ?
 Interest of dinstinctions between situations
 Interest of modelling presumed effects of narration
and testing real effects
 Interest both for classic and interactive narratives
 Interest for researchers and designers

4. Comprehension
I define ʻeducative effectsʼ in terms of
comprehension.
Comprehension is defined following
Model of Comprehension of Van Dijk and
Kintsch (1983)
Comprehension process: double process
(top down and bottom up) of construction of
a coherent representation

5. Understanding narrative
The reader must build a representation of
narrative referent
• Story Schemata (for ex. Mandler 1984)
• Mental Models Theory (Johnson-Laird 1983)
• Consistent and coherent with narratology

6. Narrative comprehension
Following Herman (2002) narrative comprehension
goes through the construction (by the reader) of a
storyworld
This storyworld is:
•A mental model of ʻwhatʼs going on?ʼ
•Set up by bottum-up (microdesign) and top-down
(macrodesign) process

7. Use of narrative for
comprehension
Herman (2003):
“My hypothesis is that stories provide, to a degree that
needs to be determined by future research, domain-
general tools for thinking”
→ Storyworld is the base on which
comprehension of educative matter transmitted
through a narrative is allowed

8. The ʻlevelsʼ of narration
We postulate educational use of narrative on at least
two levels:
•Surface level (storyworld related to the story)
•Deep level (storyworld related to knowledge domain)
→ Different comprehension effects ?

9. Research Assumptions
• Deep level narrative should lead subjects to build
a relatively unified representation
• Surface level narrative should oblige subjects to
work with two levels of representation : one for
the story itself and one another for the educative
content

10. Research Assumptions (II)
A&B mixed A. Storyworld useful for
Storyworld useful for: the story
•The story +
•The educative content B. Representation of
educative content
STORY

11. Methodology
• Quasi-experimentation
• Comparison of representation of a scientific
phenomenon whether explained with a surface level
narrative or a deep level narrative
• Coherence of representations is observed with
questionnaires : definition question, problem-solving
question and drawing the phenomena
• Indicators : relations between elements, specific
vocabulary, conjunctions and disjunctions, ability of
abstracting and re-use gathered info

12. Current experimentations
• Subjects : 100 children of 5th year elementary school
(+/-11 year old)
• Experimental material : 3 versions of the explanation
(short website) of a scientific phenomenon (decay
formation)
• Deep level, surface level and control group (non-
narrative unfollowing Adam criteria [1996])
• Individual passation

13. Current experimentations (II)
Summary of (quasi) experimental design:
Identification questionnaire
Deep level Surface level Control
conditon condition group
Deep level Surface level Non-narrative
narrative narrative explanation
Same questionnaire

14. Conclusions
• Forthcoming results
• Elements to take in consideration:
 Nuances in results
 Extraction operations
 Never forget whatʼs the goal of an
educative document: the
presented distinction make no
sense without this

15. Thank you for your attention.
Baptiste Campion
baptiste.campion@uclouvain.be
Université catholique de Louvain
Ruelle de la Lanterne Magique 14
BE 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium)