Examining pre-service teachers’ opinions about digital story design

Abstract

Math is a subject in which students are generally not very interested and are unsuccessful compared to other courses. It has been suggested that digital stories designed for educational purposes could be used to prevent students’ lack of interest and failure in this subject. However, designing stories that are fit for purpose is important if the use of digital stories is to be successful. The purpose of this study is to investigate pre-service teachers’ opinions about how they utilized the steps of Gagne’s model while designing digital stories for math lessons. The participants in the study were 49 pre-service teachers studying at a Math Department at a Turkish state university in the spring term of the 2014–2015 academic year. The Pre-service Teachers’ Opinion Form and a Personal Information Form, both developed by the researchers, were used as data collection tools in the study, in which the qualitative method was adopted. Content analysis was utilized to analyze the data collected through open-ended questions. When the findings were examined it was seen that pre-service teachers had designed digital stories in which they often chose to attract attention by creating interesting characters in the “gaining students’ attention” step of Gagne’s teaching model, that the main character stated the objectives/topic in the story precisely in the “informing students of the objectives” step, and that the characters created repeated the previous topic in the “stimulating recall of prior learning” step. In the current study, the integration of digital story design into lesson plans in accordance with Gagne’s model was carried out and pre-service teachers’ opinions about their experiences of this process were investigated.