THE EFFECT OF DIGITAL STORYTELLING ON ANXIETIES OF THE 7TH GRADERS AT SECONDARY SCHOOL TOWARDS STORY WRITING

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to seek into the effect of digital storytelling on the story writing anxiety of 7th graders at secondary school. The quasiexperimental design among quantitative methods was employed and two groups were designed through simple random sampling. Since the pre-test was planned to be used before the experiment, the study was maintained with a pre-test/posttest matched control group design. The study group was composed of 35 students in Grade 7 at a private secondary school in the Central District of Kars. The study was carried out in Turkish lessons for 7th graders in the 2018-2019 education year. The experiment group consisted of the students in Class 7-A (18 students) in a private school in the Central District of Kars while the control group was of Class 7-B (17 students) in the same school. Before starting the research, permissions of the ethics committee and governorship were obtained for the scale to be used in the research. The purpose of the study and process of the study were explained in detail to the school administration and related teachers. Story Writing Anxiety Scale and personal information form were used as data collection tools. The data obtained was first recorded in the excel program, and then in the SPSS program. Because the data did not follow a normal distribution, Mann Whitney U-Test for intergroup analysis and Wilcoxon signed-rank test for intragroup analysis among non-parametrical statistics were used. As a result of analysis; it was found that there is a significant difference in favour of the experiment group in terms of post-test scores of story writing anxiety among the groups after the experiment. At the same time; it was found that there is a significant difference in favour of the post-test between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group. These findings revealed that the digital storytelling creation process contributed to the decrease of the story writing anxiety of the students. Accordingly, it is suggested that the effects of digital storytelling at different graders of education on story-writing anxiety can be investigated, different methods and techniques can be used, and digital storytelling can be included in curriculums.