Prior biology knowledge tentatively moderates material effectiveness: non-STEM students favor narratives, STEM students favor expository texts for recall and understanding¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study (2 entries) · causal r2 · q2–q3 · i1 small
Currency · newest study 2025 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i1 Non-STEM-background students in the narrative group showed a trend of outperforming non-STEM students in the expository group in recall (d = 0.33, BF = 4.30) and understanding (d = 0.29, BF = 3.51), while STEM students showed a trend favoring expository materials (recall d = −0.30; understanding d = −0.20). → Samuel Tobler 2025 q2 i1 A small significant interaction effect between learning material and educational background was found for recall (d = 0.33), with a small nonsignificant effect for understanding (d = 0.25). → Samuel Tobler 2025 (2)

Evidence¶

Samuel Tobler 2025¶

Samuel Tobler, Tanmay Sinha, Katja Köhler, Manu Kapur. (2025). Teaching biology with narratives: examining the impact of affective and cognitive variables on undergraduate student learning. Instructional Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-025-09723-w

q2 · i1 · causal · r2

Follow-up simple main effect analyses comparing narrative vs. expository within non-STEM and STEM subgroups found no statistically significant differences, but effect sizes and Bayes Factors suggested a trend favoring narratives for non-STEM students ("d = 0.33, BF = 4.30" for recall) and expository for STEM students.

"there appears to be a trend of non-STEM background students in the narrative group outperforming the non-STEM background students in the expository group in recall and understanding (recall: d = 0.33, BF = 4.30; understanding: d = 0.29, BF = 3.51)"

Samuel Tobler 2025 (2)¶

Samuel Tobler, Tanmay Sinha, Katja Köhler, Manu Kapur. (2025). Teaching biology with narratives: examining the impact of affective and cognitive variables on undergraduate student learning. Instructional Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-025-09723-w

q3 · i1 · causal · r2

The two-way ANOVA's learning material × educational background interaction reached significance only for recall ("F(1,86) = 2.251, p <.05, d = 0.33"), with no interaction effect for transfer (d = 0.00).

"we only found small significant interaction effects for recall (F(1,86) = 2.251, p <.05, d = 0.33) and a small nonsignificant effect for understanding (F(1,86) = 1.276, p =.262, d = 0.25)"

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Text cohesion interacts with background knowledge: low-knowledge readers benefit from high cohesion, high-knowledge readers from low cohesion (reverse cohesion effect)
• Learning mechanisms are triggered to a greater extent for non-STEM-background students in the narrative condition and for STEM-background students in the expository condition — possibly the same claim (merge candidate)
• Narrative and expository instruction produce no significant differences in recall or understanding of biological concepts — related
• Narrative instruction produces higher transfer performance than expository instruction in undergraduate biology learning — related
• Background knowledge has a greater impact on comprehension of expository texts than narrative texts for primary children — related
• Subjects with a more developed schema for a body of knowledge show higher recall for materials related to that knowledge — related