Does Narrative Skill Training Increase Transcendent Thinking and Social-Emotional Wellbeing Among Minoritized Adolescents?

Overview:

Researchers will test how teaching minority adolescents narrative skills impacts their thinking and well-being, hoping to find a sustainable way to improve these skills in diverse youth.

Abstract:

Society faces a hydra-headed crisis of youth’s lack of deep reasoning, or transcendent thinking, and lack of social-emotional wellbeing. Compelling evidence suggests that the way young people comprehend, construct, convey, and construe narratives represents a form of agency they have over driving their own intellectual and emotional development—a truth that is observable psychosocially and neurobiologically. Narrative skills improve with intervention, but such interventions have rarely been conducted with adolescents, especially from minoritized groups. The aim of this project is to refine and test immediate and delayed impacts of a narrative skills intervention on expanding early adolescents’ transcendent thinking and psychological wellbeing. 180 minoritized early adolescents will be assessed for transcendent thinking, psychological wellbeing, and other related measures pre-intervention, immediately post-intervention, and again 2 months later. Participants will be randomized by school into treatment, active control, and no-touch control groups. To teach narrative skills to early adolescents in a way that makes them feel empowered rather than patronized (as youth at this stage are prone to feel), they will engage in two 1-hour training sessions about narrative skills, followed by 10 weekly 30-minute sessions tutoring younger children in how to use narrative skills. Active controls will engage in two 1-hour sessions about teaching reading, followed by 10 weekly 30-minute sessions tutoring younger children in reading. We hypothesize that adolescents who participate in the narrative skills intervention will show improvements in transcendent thinking and social-emotional wellbeing (relative to active- and no-touch control groups). We hypothesize that improvements will be sustained after the conclusion of the intervention. We expect that this study could provide necessary evidence of the importance of narrative skill development for expanding the Perception Box and serve as the basis for a scalable, sustainable, inexpensive narrative skills intervention for diverse youth.

Broader Impact:

This project will test whether teaching storytelling skills to minoritized adolescents can help them think more deeply, understand themselves better, and feel more emotionally supported. If successful, it could offer a simple, scalable way to boost well-being and critical thinking in youth who are often overlooked, with long-term benefits for both individuals and society.