The Impact of Creative Storytelling with a Positive Approach on the Emotional Skills based on Empathy for Elementary School Boys

Stories are good tools for development of child thinking or child philosophy, and today they are used as tools to promote children's thinking. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the impact of storytelling with a positive attitude on ethical skills of elementary school boys in Kermanshah.

After parental consent for their children to participate in storytelling sessions, the empathy questionnaire of Auyeung et al. (2009) was used. Twenty boys in elementary school during the educational year of 1398-1399 were selected by using accessible sampling and 10 of them were randomly assigned to experimental group and 10 to control group. They got pre-test sessions that were conducted in both groups before the beginning of the sessions and then for the experimental group 8 sessions of two 45-minute weekly sessions of storytelling. Intervention focused on empathy and the control group received no intervention. At the end of the sessions, post-test was again taken from both groups and then the data were analyzed using the Mann-Whitney test.

Findings showed that there was no significant difference between the studied children before storytelling intervention. Also in the control group, there was no significant difference in pre-test and post-test phases, but empathy was increased in the experimental group after intervention and post-test.Discussion and

Based on the results, it can be concluded that storytelling is effective in promoting empathy for elementary school boys. So, if this method is used consistently by elementary schools, libraries, intellectual development centers and psychology centers to teach empathy, many of the behavioral problems in children can be reduced.