Articles of interest: Expectations

Expectations: Titles, Stories, Pictures is the title of an article written by Perry Nodelman. The article explains how a series of experiments were carried out with students. Split into two main groups, one which had no taught knowledge of the workings of picture books and the second group would be tested once they had gained such knowledge. The tests were to see how this knowledge would affect the expectations of the students. The experiment would comprise of the students initially only receiving the title of the book, they would then write what they would expect it to be about. Then they would be given the first sentence from the book and asked how this compares to the title, what are their expectations now from the book? Next they would be read the whole story and once again asked questions on how they received the book compared to their expectations. Finally the students were shown the illustrations within the book. They were asked if they met with their expectations, how did they differ, had it changed their opinion on what the story was about? Both sets of groups showed a large difference in their expectations, the group who had learned more about the structure, plots etc used within picture books had more conventional ideas on what the book might be about. Some were far closer as to how the story may go, the group without prior knowledge seemed to be all over the place. This highlighted to me the importance of issues such as the title, opening sentence and how the illustration might oppose or reinforce the words. My own project will require more thought on how I want to approach such issues, do I want people to understand the story straight from the title. Perhaps I could use another title leading them to expect a story about something else. These types of issues will only be resolved by trial and error, perhaps testing on other will also influences my choices on such topics. Some extracts from the article are shown below.