An Investigation of Children’s Ability to Comprehend Character Motives

Abstract

This study examined second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade children’s abilities to recall and to answer questions concerning character motives after listening to or reading nine fables that were divided equally, according to the explicitness of the character motive, into three categories: textually explicit, textually implicit, and scriptally implicit. Separate 3×2×3 ANOVAs with repeated measures for each of four dependent measures (recall of character motives, recall of important details, questions concerning character motives, and questions concerning important details) revealed no statistically significant difference for mode of input across dependent measures, a statistically significant difference for grade level (6 > 4 > 2) on questions concerning character motives, and a statistically significant difference among text types (TE > TI or SI). A descriptive analysis of students’ overall performance revealed that elementary grade students had considerable difficulty comprehending character motives in fables, suggesting that character motives may not be central to young children’s understanding of stories. A discussion is offered to explain these results within the context of other research and to make suggestions for further research.