New Perspectives in Science Education

The use of digital technologies in education has become essential and unavoidable similar to many areas of life. In order to increase the effectiveness of learning, new methods and techniques have been widely used in educational settings. One of the new methods that is widely used in education is digital storytelling. The aim of this study is to investigate the quality of digital stories developed by pre-service science teachers in terms of different dimensions. Phenomenology from qualitative research methods is used for study design. The criterion sampling was used from the purposeful sampling methods to determine the participants. The study was carried out in the spring semester of 2018-2019 academic years with 40 pre-service teachers from Eskisehir Osmangazi University. At the beginning of the process, a total of 4 hours of training was given to the prospective teachers about nature of science, characteristics of scientific knowledge, approaches to teaching nature of science, and digital story creation process. Throughout the process, pre-service teachers were provided help and feedback by two researchers. The implementation period of the project is approximately 3 months. Pre-service teachers worked in groups and developed digital stories about lives of scientists. These digital stories (N=19) were evaluated using the Digital Storytelling Rubric in Educational Context. Digital stories were scored by two independent evaluators, and the weighted kappa coefficients were calculated and it was determined that very good and good agreement between the two evaluators for majority of dimensions. When the digital stories are examined in terms of product quality, it is concluded that the vast majority of digital products prepared by science are of high quality. Experimental studies can be conducted in which the digital stories prepared by pre-service science teachers are applied in actual classroom settings and at different grade levels, and the effects of these applications on various variables are examined.

Keywords: Digital storytelling, science pre-service teachers, Educational Digital Storytelling Evaluation Rubric;

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