Sociocultural factors in children's written narrative production

Narrative themes, such as search and discovery, are universal and transcend the modularity of language, culture, time, and physical setting. Narratives share a cohesive organizational structure. This study, by assessing children's written versions, examines their understanding and integration of the story structure of a series of simple black and white line drawings. The study was conducted with students from the second, fourth, and sixth grades in low and high SES schools. Our results showed that the written narratives of the low SES groups, across the grade levels, had fewer narrative structure elements (overall, inter, and intra episode relationships) than those of their high SES counterparts. Although the results for the high SES groups show a relationship between the narrative structure elements and text length, this relationship is not evident in the low SES results. These results may have implications for future investigation and possible application in educational policy, especially for low SES populations.