The Impact of Storytelling on Improving Social Problems, Aggressive Behaviors, and Law-Breaking Behaviors of Primary School Children

This article focuses on effect of storytelling on improving emotional-behavioral issues such as social problems, aggressive behavior, and rule of law breaking behavior among male and female elementary school children. This is an experimental study on 68 students studying at an elementary school in a City of Iran in the academic year 2017-2018. Then the parent version of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) was completed purposively to select 30 students with the highest scores. They were then randomly divided equally into the experimental and control groups (15 participants per group). The experimental group received fifteen 60-minute sessions taught by two teachers experienced in storytelling. When the storytelling period was over, the CBCL was given to the parents and teachers who had first completed it. The multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) was employed to analyze the data in SPSS 23. According to the results, there was only a significant difference between the experimental and control group in rule of law breaking behavior at the end of the storytelling sessions based on the assessment made by parents and teachers. Regarding social problems and aggressive behavior, there was no significant difference between the two groups. In addition, analysis of the partial eta squared (η²) values showed that storytelling explained 13% of variance of the rule of law breaking behavior.