The role of perspective-taking in reading and its relationship to empathy in children /by Malerie Elise Goodman.

Research demonstrates that the development of empathy is related to prosocial behavior, and may be increased in children via interventions practicing perspective-taking to produce positive social effects. Reading comprehension seems to inherently involve perspective-taking with story characters in order to understand the context of a story; literature-based interventions have demonstrated moderate success in increasing prosocial behavior. This study investigated the use of a perspective-taking reading intervention to increase the empathy of 17 sixth- and seventh-grade students. Pre- and posttest scores on Bryant???s Index of Empathy for Children and Adolescents and an AIMSweb MAZE task were compared to determine if students who evaluated literature by writing a paragraph from the perspective of a story character (N=9) experienced a greater increase in empathy and reading comprehension than students who evaluated literature by recording facts from the story (N=8). Differences in empathy and reading comprehension between pre- and posttests were not significant. Although this suggests that utilizing perspective-taking interventions while reading literature is ineffective to increase empathy or improve reading comprehension, limitations of the present study merit further examination of the concept