African Educational Research Journal Special Issue 8(3) - The effect of digital story applications on students' academic achievement: A meta-analysis study

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Stanford

This meta-analysis synthesizes experimental research on how digital story applications affect students’ academic achievement. Studies were retrieved using keywords “digital story, digital storytelling, academic achievement” across Web of Science, ERIC, EBSCOhost, ULAKBİM TR Index, Google Academic, and YOK Dissertation databases. Random-effects analysis with 95% confidence interval, performed via Comprehensive Meta-Analysis (CMA), produced an average effect size of 0.750. Results indicate a high impact on improving academic achievement; moderator effects differed by course type and teaching level, while publication type and study origin were non-significant.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages14

Reading Time35 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Introduction

Digital story and academic achievement

Digital storytelling components and educational use

African Educational Research Journal Special Issue 8(3), pp. S62-S75, October 2020 DOI: 10. 30918/AERJ. 8S3.20.047 ISSN: 2354-2160 Full Length Research Paper The effect of digital story applications on students'academic achievement: A meta-analysis study Nurullah Sahin1* and İsmail Coban2 1Turkish and Social Sciences Education, Faculty of Education, Agri Ibrahim Cecen University, Agri, Turkey. 2Turkish and Social Sciences Education, Faculty of Education, Artvin Coruh University, Artvin, Turkey. | ABSTRACT
The digital story, which is considered as a method that focuses on students, and makes them engaged in the learning process, presents a profile suitable for student-centered modern education systems with this feature. For this reason, digital story has become a subject frequently studied in educational research for the last 20 years. In this study, it is aimed to synthesize the results obtained from experimental studies on the effect of digital story method on students' academic achievement. The studies examined within the scope of the research have been accessed by using the keywords "digital story, digital storytelling, academic achievement" in Web of Science, ERIC, EBSCOhost, ULAKBİM TR Index, Google Academic and YOK Dissertation databases. According to the results obtained from the analyzes performed according to random effects model at 95% confidence interval using the Comprehensive Meta-Analysis (CMA) software, the average effect size was estimated as 0.750. According to Cohen et al. (2011), this result indicates a high level of impact of digital story applications on increasing students' academic achievement. In educational processes using digital story and other teaching methods, students' academic achievement differences were examined in line with the moderator variables. While the type of course and teaching level variables make a significant difference on the effect sizes of the studies, the type of publication and the study origin variables did not make a significant difference.
Keywords: Digital story, digital storytelling, academic achievement, meta-analysis. | | --- | | *Corresponding author. E-mail: [nsahin.86@gmail.com. Tel:](nsahin.86@gmail.com. Tel:) +90-555-581-88-86 . | INTRODUCTION Digital story and academic achievement Digital storytelling, which is the result of the integration of traditional storytelling with technology, enables students to form their own stories and interact with them, on the one hand, and differs from traditional storytelling on the other because it uses information and communication technologies (Dörner et al. , 2002) . Digital story with increased areas of use in different disciplines recently is generally described as short, individual and multimedia stories that share information using multimedia tools or resources (Meadows, 2003 and Yüksel, 2011) . The foundations of the digital story, which expresses the digital narration of stories for a specific purpose, were laid in the USA in the 1970s and 1980s. The Digital Media Center, which was established in San Francisco in 1994, moved to Berkeley in 1998 and became a Digital Storytelling Center, and this center has worked with many institutions and organizations from different parts of the world, forming the basis for workshops that will teach digital storytelling skills in the following years (Center for Digital Storytelling, 2020) . This center stated that digital storytelling has 7 components. These are as follows (Lambert, 2003 and Bull and Kajder, 2004): 1. Perspective 2. A Dramatic Question 3. Emotional Content 4. Economy 5. Voice 6. Music 7. Pacing / Rhythm The first four of these components are related to the content and writing of the story, while the others are related to the formation of the story. Robin and Pierson (2005), on the other hand, talked about the 10 components by adding the “Story Purpose, “Image Quality” and “Good Grammar and Language Use”components to these 7 co

FAQs

What is the main purpose of this study?

To synthesize results from experimental studies examining the effect of digital story applications on students’ academic achievement through a meta-analysis.

How were the included studies selected?

Studies were accessed by searching keywords “digital story, digital storytelling, academic achievement” in Web of Science, ERIC, EBSCOhost, ULAKBİM TR Index, Google Academic, and YOK Dissertation databases.

What overall effect did digital story applications show?

Using a random-effects model at a 95% confidence interval, the average effect size was estimated as 0.750, indicating a high level of impact on increasing academic achievement.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Stanford