Xu, Yan, Hyungsung Park, and Youngkyun Baek. “A New Approach Toward Digital Storytelling: An Activity Focused on Self-efficacy in a Virtual Learning Environment.” Educational Technology & Society 14.4 (October 2011): 181-91. Web. 1 May 2012.
This article covers an experiment in which one group created digital stories in Second Life while the other created them off-line, attempting to discover where learning was better or more frequent. They introduce storytelling and then digital storytelling, making sure that they foreground the writing of/in digital storytelling as essential. They had a questionnaire to judge writing self-efficacy and used the Flow State Scale both as a pre- and post-test. The changes were significant for the online writing experience of digital storytelling, but not for the other group.
The study took place in South Korea with South Korean students, so it might not apply to the US. The study involved only two classes and a total of sixty-four undergraduates. However, the two groups were equal in number. If they did in fact do a pre-test, they didn’t show those scores. In addition, both the scales were originally constructed in English and translated, so they might not have been equally reliable in Korean.
What this is useful for is offering a way to potentially better utilize digital storytelling in the classroom to improve student writing. It also could be repeated to see if the experience holds up in the US. It would be fairly easy to do with two classes, but much harder to do with any more than that.
RrNm Ann Bib