Discovering the meaning behind the story : creating a system for documenting and supporting children's narrative development

Narrative is a powerful core component of human development. Our ability to tell stories has been credited as one of the major influences for the success of the human species. We communicate, think, encode memories, dream, and learn about the world around us through stories. As story-beings, we need to recognize and harness the power of narrative as an educational tool. Despite the importance of narratives, there are significant gaps in the literature for understanding children's narrative development and designing interventions to support growth. Unlike literacy, there are no state-reported statistics of the rates of narrative development for children, nor are there established consistent methods with comprehensive metrics to systematically document narrative progress or evaluate interventions. These gaps are perpetuated by the complex space of narrative, specifically in the form of the content and the social, cultural, and individual context.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Woolf, Anneli Rane.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Deb Roy.

• Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/127910

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/127910