Using digital storytelling in Turkish lessons for 7th graders at secondary school

The aim of this study is to seek into the effect of digital storytelling on the attitude towards story writing, story writing anxiety levels, and digital literacy in Turkish lessons of 7th graders at secondary school. Sequential explanatory design among mixed research methods was employed. Quasi experimental model was used in collection of quantitative data and two groups were designed through simple random sampling. Since pre-test was planned to be used before the experiment, the study was maintained with a pre-test/post-test matched control group design and quantitative data was composed through that. Non-random purposive (homogenous) sampling was employed in order to examine the students' viewpoints in depth in order to collect the qualitative data for the study. The study group is composed of 35 students in Grade 7 at a private secondary school in Central District of Kars. The study was carried out in Turkish lessons for 7th graders in 2018-2019 education year. The experiment group consisted of the students in Class 7-A (18 students) in a private school in Central District of Kars while the control group was of Class 7-B (17 students) in the same school. Attitude Scale Towards Story Writing, Story Writing Anxiety Scale, Digital Literacy Scale were used as quantitative data collection tools. Semi-structured interview forms for the students were used as qualitative data collection tools. Quantitative data were obtained through Attitude Scale Towards Story Writing, Story Writing Anxiety Scale and Digital Literacy Scale. The scales given to the experiment and control groups before the experiment were applied to both groups after the experiment. Thus, quantitative data was obtained through that process. The data obtained was first recorded in excel program, and then in SPSS program. The qualitative data was obtained from the interviews with the students. 7 open-ended questions were asked to the students individually. The interviews lasted for 5-8 minutes considering their individualistic differences. The interviews were also recorded in tapes. The voice-records were deciphered and transferred to the Word document. Since quantitative data did not follow normal distribution, Mann Whitney U-Test and Wilcoxon signed-rank test among non-parametrical statistics were used. Content analysis was used for qualitative data. As a result of the study, it was found that there is a significant difference in favour of the experiment group in terms of post-test points of attitude towards story writing, story writing anxiety and digital literacy among the groups after the experiment. The students stated in the interviews that they had pleasure from digital story writing process and want the digital stories to be integrated in their lessons. Keywords: Digital storytelling, attitude towards story writing, story writing anxiety, digital literacy