Effects of Digital Storytelling in Mathematics Instruction on Academic Achievement and Examination of Teacher-Student Opinions on the Process

Abstract

Storytelling is a popular instrument used in every domain of natural and social interaction for human communication and commonly used in classrooms to enrich the learning experience. With the use of technological tools in every field of our daily lives, its use in educational environments has become inevitable and in parallel with the development of these tools, digital stories have started to replace traditional storytelling. Digital storytelling offers advantages such as providing diverse applications in the classroom environment, personalizing the learning experience, being interesting, helping difficult subjects explained, addressing real-life-related situations, supporting active learning, allowing for the creation of costless learning environments, and improving motivation and achievement. Materializing a course such as mathematics in which abstract concepts are given, helping students use the learned information with stories and associate it with daily life, developing activities to make learning environments enjoyable when learning and applying by taking students away from the traditional understanding of instruction are considered some of the most important duties of teachers in this process. In accordance with the related considerations, this study aims to investigate the effects of mathematics courses instructed by association with digital storytelling on 8th-grade students' academic achievements and the teacher and student opinions on the application process. The study using the quasi-experimental method was conducted with 58 students. The Achievement Test, written opinion forms to receive student opinions and interview form for teacher were prepared by the researchers to this end. At the end of the study, although no statistically significant differences were found between the groups in the posttest and the delayed-posttest in terms of academic achievement score averages of the students in the experimental group were found to be higher than the score averages of the students in the control group. The results achieved in this study show that digital storytelling is a powerful instrument to create more interesting and enjoyable learning environments which facilitate association with daily life, allow for effective learning and participation. It was also stated that the students and the mathematics teacher had positive opinions on use of digital stories in the courses and its contribution to the courses.

Digital Story Conceptual Change Oriented (DSCC) to Reduce Students’ Misconceptions in Physics

“…A digital story is considered to be used because it could be applied in the various scientific disciplines and it can improve students' achievement compared to PowerPoint presentations (Özpinar, Gökçe, & Yenmez, 2017). It can train high-level thinking skills, increase motivation, and bring forth competent student performance, writing skills, reading skills, enhance student concentration, and improve pleasant learning situation in writing (Dewi, Savitri, Taufiq, & Khusniati, 2018).…”

A Development Design of Digital Story Conceptual Change-Oriented in Physics Subject

“…But overall, all students' responses are positive. Thus, it can be said that digital story is a powerful instrument for creating an interesting, fun learning environment and is able to connect problems contextually [22]. The reflection of this result was focused on the students' difficulties to capture the information in the digital stories learning [23].…”

Meta-Analytic and Meta-Thematic Analysis of Digital Storytelling Method

“…Moreover, in this method where the technology is utilized effectively in adding images to written texts (Demirer, 2013), concretizing of abstract concepts, and thus, making the lesson more apprehensible (Büyükcengiz, 2017;Robin, 2008) can be regarded as reasons of improvement in the achievement. On the other hand, some studies have revealed that there is no significant difference between the digital storytelling method and traditional teaching methods in terms of academic achievement (Abdolmanafi-Rokni & Qarajeh, 2014;Nam, 2017;Özpinar et al, 2017).…”

“…In this context, the meta-analysis dimension of the study was performed, and the results of previous studies on the subject were examined to reach a general judgment by presenting the existing knowledge. Unlike the studies that suggest that the digital storytelling is an effective approach to academic achievement in the literature (Abiola, 2014;Aktaş & Yurt, 2017;Büyükcengiz, 2017;Çiçek, 2018;Demirer, 2013;Francis, 2018;Göçen, 2014;Hung et al, 2012;Ing, 2018;Kahraman, 2013;Liu et al, 2018;Özerbaş & Öztürk, 2017;Yang & Wu, 2012); also several studies state that the method has no or low impact on academic achievement (Abdolmanafi-Rokni & Qarajeh, 2014;Nam, 2017;Özpinar, Gökçe & Yenmez, 2017). Therefore, added results of various studies on the effect of the digital storytelling method on academic achievement.…”