A Project-based Digital Storytelling Approach for Improving Students' Learning Motivation, Problem-Solving Competence and Learning Achievement

Although project-based learning is a well-known and widely used instructional strategy, it remains a challenging issue to effectively apply this approach to practical settings for improving the learning performance of students. In this study, a project-based digital storytelling approach is proposed to cope with this problem. With a quasi-experiment, the proposed approach has been applied to a learning activity of a science course in an elementary school. A total of 117 Grade 5 students in an elementary school in southern Taiwan were assigned to an experimental group (N = 60) and a control group (N = 57) to compare the performance of the approach with that of conventional project-based learning. A web-based information-searching system, Meta-Analyzer, was used to enable the students to collect data on the Internet based on the questions raised by the teachers, and Microsoft's Photo Story was used to help the experimental group develop movies for storytelling based on the collected data. Moreover, several measuring tools, including the science learning motivation scale, the problem-solving competence scale and the science achievement test, were used to collect feedback as well as evaluate the learning performance of the students. The experimental results show that the project-based learning with digital storytelling could effectively enhance the students' science learning motivation, problem-solving competence, and learning achievement.