The effect of digital stories on the primary school students' listening comprehension and creative writing skills

The digital story consists of the transfer of story text in written form to digital media by combining it with multimedia tools. This study aimed to determine the effect of digital stories on the comprehension of listening and creative writing skills of 4th grade students. For this purpose, the research was designed with a semi-experimental research model with a pre-test post-test control group. The sample of the study consisted of 52 students who were studying in two different fourth grade classrooms in the public elementary school in Bozova district of Şanlıurfa. The data was collected in the second half of the 2018-2019 academic year. Firstly, in the research, 4th grade Turkish books prepared by the Ministry of National Education in 2014, 2016, and 2017 were used in determining story texts. Eight texts under four themes that are "Beautiful Country Turkey" and "Production, Consumption and Productivity" were selected from these three years. These selected stories have been digitized through "Adobe Illustrator" and "Adobe After Effects" programs. During the research, 8 digital stories created by the researcher were presented to the experimental group. In the control group, the texts of these stories were read to the students by the teacher, and the pictures of the stories were showed to children. At the beginning and end of the eight-week process, students in experimental and control groups were made to write three stories with the help of story maps prepared by the researcher. The Listening Comprehension Test was used to determine students' listening comprehension achievement scores, and Creative Writing Rubric was used to assess children's creative writing scores at the beginning and end of the process. In the study, it was concluded that digital stories increased the comprehension and creative writing success scores of the experimental and control groups, but no significant difference was observed in the comprehension and creative writing scores when the experimental and control groups were compared.