A Digital Storytelling Group Assignment for Fostering Sense of Belonging of First-Year Students

First-year students are vulnerable to dropout as they make the challenging transition into university life. Students with a strong sense of belonging to their peers are more likely to persist. Various types of interventions aiming at improving the social-emotional well-being of students have been proposed in the literature. Getting students to work together in a non-trivial task, in particular, can conjure interpersonal interaction opportunities. This paper aims to postulate that digital storytelling group assignment is an effective intervention for fostering sense of belonging among first-year students. The key features of the group assignment, the design of the evaluation methodology, and the findings of the study are de-scribed in the paper. The sense of belonging of first-year students was found to increase significantly during the period of the group assignment. In addition, the group assignment was found to be most effective if it was administered in the first few weeks of study. The flexible nature of digital storytelling makes blending into any course straightforward.