Abstract:

Abstract Social studies is a discipline which includes mainly the subjects related to abstract concepts. Digital stories have an important role in materialising abstract thinking. Storytelling, story listening, story reading improve creative thinking and story provides permanent learning when combined with education. Digital storytelling is a method that can be used to develop students’ skills appropriate to the age we live in, to arouse their perceptions, to encourage them, and to increase their motivation to learn. Presenting the effect size of using digital stories on training individuals in the digital age on motivation will reveal the importance and requirement of using digital stories appropriate to the current age. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of using digital stories while lecturing about subjects in the “Realizing Dreams” unit of the Social Studies course on students’ motivation. The study group includes 72 fifth-grade students in two different classes of Makbule Suleyman Alkan Secondary School, located in Izmir. In this study, an experimental model was used. Also, Turkish version (Kutu & Sözbilir, 2011) of the ARCS motivation survey developed by Keller (1987) was used to measure the motivation.  As a result of the research, a significant difference was found in support of the experimental group which digital stories were used in terms of general motivations and sub-dimensions (attention-compliance and trust-satisfaction). In this context, it can be said that the student group in which digital stories are used as material is more motivated in terms of general motivation and sub-dimensions than the student group in which the videos in Eba are used as material.

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