From Freytag pyramid story structure to digital storytelling: Adventures of pre-service teachers as story writers and digital story tellers

Writing is a complex skill that includes both physical and cognitive, metacognitive processes. Therefore, it is one of the most difficult language skills to develop. Mastering writing requires the effective use of various skills such as organizing ideas, a well-developed vocabulary, self-organization, and effective use of spelling, grammar, etc. In teaching and learning settings, students should be provided with various writing approaches or methods by which they will be able to acquire the necessary text composition skills and thus express their emotions and thoughts in a well-organized written form. To accomplish such a target, teachers have a crucial role. Therefore, this experimental study aimed to examine the adventures of pre-service teachers in the primary education department from story-writing training based on the Freytag Pyramid to creating their own digital stories. The research design was determined as a single-group pretest–posttest quasi-experimental design. The experimental process consisted of 5 stages and lasted a total of 13 weeks. The study group was composed of 20 volunteer pre-service teachers based on the criterion sampling method. Data for the research was collected using the Scale of Story Writing Skill, Scoring Rubric for Digital Stories, and the Transformative Learning Scale for Information and Communication Technologies. In the study, the assumptions of normality were first examined on the obtained data. Accordingly, paired sample t-tests, Pearson correlation, and multiple regression analyses were conducted. The results showed that there is a significant difference in favor of the final test story writing scores among pre-service teachers between their pretest and posttest story writing scores, which indicates the positive effect of writing training based on the Freytag Pyramid. The results also show that there are moderate positive correlations found between teacher candidates' story writing scores and their scores on digital story-1, digital story-2, and digital story final tests, but the scores of transformative learning for information and communication technologies, together with the final test scores of the teacher candidates' story writing, significantly predict their digital story (posttest) scores.