“Once Upon A Star”: A Science Education Program Based on Personification Storytelling in Promoting Preschool Children’s Understanding of Astronomy Concepts

Research Findings: Grounded on personification storytelling, this interven-tion study introduced a science program including extensive astronomyconcepts to 24 children (4–5 years). The storytelling attributes personalcharacteristics to cosmic bodies with metaphors relating to children’s livesin explaining the scientific concepts, for example, the star explosion ispresented as “a big vomit.” Drawing on such storytelling combined withfollow up hands-on activities and free drawing, the children showed sig-nificant improvement in their understanding of the astronomy concepts.The children’s understanding was assessed with means of triangulation,including the analysis on pre- and post-intervention interviews, educators’documentations, and children’s work samples. The analysis was based onVygotsky’s sociocultural notion of children’s development of understandingfrom everyday concepts to scientific concepts. This study demonstratespreschool children’s potential in understanding abstract astronomy con-cepts that were considered unsuitable to them. Practice or Policy: Thepedagogical function of storytelling in science education is widely recog-nized, yet its application is impaired by the fact that writing stories isdifficult. The personification storytelling would inspire the story writingemploying the similar strategies for the promotion of science education.This study confirms the claim that preschool children are capable of devel-oping conceptual understanding in “real astronomy.”