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Since 2005, educators and graduate students at the University of Houston's
Instructional Technology
Program have been conducting a series of research projects to evaluate the effectiveness of Digital Storytelling. In one case, three groups of public school teachers are being tracked following their participation in an intensive Digital Storytelling workshop offered at the University of Houston campus. The three groups, composed of elementary, middle and high school teachers, were shown examples of different types of digital stories and then learned to create digital stories that they could use in their own classrooms. The teachers are completing surveys that will be used to measure and evaluate whether or not they have continued to use Digital Storytelling as a component of their instructional practice, the impact of such use and in cases, where there is no use of Digital Storytelling, what are the barriers to its use. The
table below illustrates the specific research questions that are being investigated.
Research Questions for Teachers Who Completed a Digital Storytelling Workshop
| Teachers who ARE USING Digital Storytelling |
Teachers who ARE NOT USING Digital Storytelling |
| How are you using Digital Storytelling? |
Why are you not using Digital Storytelling? What are the obstacles? |
| Are you creating digital stories to show to your students? |
Do you have questions about how to use Digital Storytelling in your instruction? |
| Are you teaching your students to create their own digital stories? |
Are you experiencing technical problems? If so, what problems are you having? |
| If students are using Digital Storytelling, what are the outcomes? |
Are you interested in additional Digital Storytelling training sessions? |
| Have you demonstrated Digital Storytelling to others? If so, to other teachers? Who else? |
Are there other issues that are preventing you from using Digital Storytelling in your instruction? |
| Do you feel that Digital Storytelling has changed your teaching practice? |
Are you planning to use Digital Storytelling in the future? |
Click here to read an article about the results of this research.
Researchers in early childhood education and multimedia technology at the University of Texas at El Paso are conducting a research study on Digital Storytelling with elementary and middle school students and teachers from the border region of Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. In the study, the students are using multimedia software tools to create digital stories based on multicultural folktales and myths. The study seeks to measure the effectiveness of the Digital Storytelling activity by examining the students understanding of the major points in the folktales as well as their technology skills in creating the stories. And because many of the students in the study are second language learners of English, the effectiveness of Digital Storytelling to enhance both graphics-based technology tools and communication will undoubtedly lead to further research.
Dr. Helen Barrett has proposed a research design to collect data about Digital Storytelling in education. In part, Barrett suggests that if Digital Storytelling is to become an accepted practice in
today's schools, it will be necessary to collect data about its impact on student learning, motivation and engagement as well as teaching practices and strategies. She suggests that the following key research questions be investigated:
- How do digital stories provide evidence of deep learning?
- Under what conditions can digital stories be successfully used to support assessment for learning?
- Under what conditions do students take ownership of their digital stories?
- What are the benefits of developing digital stories as perceived by students, teachers, administrators, and/or parents?
- What are perceived obstacles to implementing digital storytelling with P-12 students and how can they be overcome?
- How does the quality of paper-based reflection differ from digital stories?
While she was a graduate student at Iowa State University, Stacy Behmer, now a teacher in Aurora, Illinois, designed an action research project around Digital Storytelling with 7th grade language arts students. Stacy and another teacher developed a curricular unit that had students creating their own digital stories on personal topics they selected. One factor that makes this project so compelling is that the unit was aligned with the classroom's literacy standards and benchmarks and assessments were developed to gather the results. Stacy also adds a personal reflection statement of her own and the entire project serves as a wonderful testament of how Digital Storytelling is motivating young learners as well as great example of research that's being done to assess its effectiveness in the classroom.
http://projects.educ.iastate.edu/~ds/Behmer/
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