Pretesting Promotes Learning but Not Generalisation 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 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 generalisation 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.