Can teaching reading comprehension foster pupils’ cognitive and affective empathy?
Résumé
Purpose Empathy allows us to access others’ emotions either from a cognitive or an affective point of view (Baron-Cohen, 2009). It is considered a primary knowledge (Geary, 2008), i.e., emerged early on in evolution and learnt implicitly. However, studies show that it is connected to reading, which is a secondary knowledge. Correlation has been demonstrated as well as causal relationship between reading and the development of empathy (Mar et al., 2006; Bal & Veltkamp, 2013). The aim of this study was to assess whether a literacy curriculum in middle school - based on thorough discussions about character’s emotions, aims, beliefs and knowledge - can foster pupils’ empathy, in its cognitive and affective dimensions. Method This research question was addressed by conducting an RCT experiment with 8th graders (N=982). 43 classes took part in this study: 16 in the experimental group and 27 in two different control groups. After training, teachers from the experimental group collaboratively created a curriculum promoting readers’ emotional engagement for the studying of selected literary fictions and implemented it in their classes for three months. Empathy was assessed in pre-test and post-test with the Basic Empathy Scale (Jolliffe & Farrington, 2006) and an adaptation of the Strange Stories Test (Happé, 1994). Results Pupils from the experimental group performed significantly better than students from both control groups on cognitive empathy, whereas results on affective empathy were not significant. Conclusions This experiment paves the way to developing empathy through teaching reading comprehension, i.e., developing a primary knowledge by teaching a secondary knowledge.