Crafting Recall: Impacts of Narrative on Semantic vs. Episodic Memory & Perceptions for an Aviation Procedure

This work examines considerations for integrating narratives into instructional design for individual and team training. Narrative, touted for its potential to enhance comprehension and retention, serves an important role in professional learning in safety-critical domains such as defense and aviation. However, not much is known about “how” and “why” narrative works. This work synthesizes concepts, theories, and findings on narrative to address gaps in the literature on its use within simulation training, focusing specifically on enhancing the memorability of instructional narrative. We present a systematic framework for crafting memorable narratives to support episodic facilitation through the grounding and framing of simulation training. We also examined the applications of this framework, through a pilot study supporting a program of research on the role and value of episodic memory (EM) within aviation training, Participants (n = 53) reviewed a text describing the steps of an exterior preflight inspection as a procedural checklist or an instructional narrative, then completed a battery of tests of their episodic recall and semantic knowledge. The narrative intervention had positive and significant effects on EM, including composite measures of tacit knowledge and EM formation, on individual features of episodic representation, and on the degree of integration of EM. As anticipated, the use of narrative failed to have any effect on semantic memory, and there were no effects on a set of affective or motivational factors as conventionally associated with narrative. The results of our study advance the concept of episodic facilitation for instructional design and provide preliminary validation of an approach to the measurement of EM for instructional events. This research may provide researchers and training practitioners the basis of a toolkit for applying and assessing the use of instructional narratives for simulations in safety-critical domains.