Why do you believe that digital storytelling supports critical reflection in learning processes?

Jean-Claude Callens: To answer this question, the assumption is made that storytelling may play an important role in a reflection-based practice. Teachers' discussions of their professional lives and practices are very often spontaneously framed in narrative form. Storytelling is the natural way through which people make sense of the events, situations, and encounters they find themselves in. In our research, we choose digital storytelling using the guidelines of Lambert (2003) as a concrete approach to storytelling. Banaszewski (2005) defines digital storytelling as "the practice of combining personal narrative with multimedia (images, audio and text) to produce a short autobiographical movie".

Our second reason to assume that digital storytelling may support critical reflection can be found in the "combination" of three arguments. Firstly, we refer to the assumption that the concept of reflection implies that students adopt an "autonomous" attitude and lecturers a "coaching" one.

Calderhead et al. (1993) describe a similar idea and emphasize the importance (in a reflection process) of the willingness of teacher educators to withdraw their support at appropriate times so that (in-service) teachers develop their own independence. Vergeer (2001) defines "autonomous acting" at school as the ability of a student - alone and with peers and teachers - to choose and realize his preferred way of learning, if a school provides the opportunity to do so.

In other words, learner control is a precursor for autonomous acting, and we assume that the degree of learner control will enhance the degree of critical reflection. Thus, we assume that more learner control may lead to more critical reflection.

Secondly, non-linearity is described as an "affordance" that can provide individuals much greater control over their learning process than a "start-to-finish", linear process (Taylor, 2004). An affordance is a term that was coined up by Gibson (Sherman, 1990). "Affordances are the perceived properties of a thing in reference to a user who influences how it is used" (Kirschner, 2002, p.12). Not only objects, but also, for example, substances, places, events, animals, and artefacts have affordances (Sherman, 1990).

Because learner control is indicated as a factor that may affect the degree of critical reflection, it may be assumed that with a non-linear approach to reflection, more control is left to the student, and thus from this perspective, supports more critical reflection.

Thirdly, in his "Digital Storytelling Cookbook", Lambert (2003) mentions several factors in supporting students to write a digital story. Because Lambert's guidelines are not presented as structured, step-by-step guidelines, digital storytelling using them is taken in this study as an example of a non-linear approach to reflection. Table one summarizes the seven elements brought forward by Lambert (2003).


You did a study on this topic. What was the assumptive premise?


Jean-Claude Callens: This is an explorative study whose main research question is twofold: "To what extent does digital storytelling support critical reflection?" and "Does learner control affect the degree of critical reflection when students reflect by writing a digital story?" We formulate the following hypothesis: a higher degree of learner control results in a higher degree of critical reflection.

Which study design did you choose?


Jean-Claude Callens: The research questions were examined with a field experiment, in which the research takes place in the subjects' "natural environment". The subjects usually do not know that they are involved in a study (Swanborn, 1987). By choosing a field experiment with real tasks during a longer period, we want to increase the ecological validity of this study. In this field experiment, a crossover design was used.

The participants were 96 teacher-training students. About half of them (n=55) were kindergarten student teachers, and the others (n=41) were primary-school student teachers. Digital storytelling was a new methodology for them. Given drop-out, we only selected the reflection assignments of 44 students (Kindergarten, n=27; primary school, n=17). The drop-out had to do with the following factors: no report was included with the digital story, not all digital stories were technically acceptable, or reflections were not complete (for instance, competencies were not mentioned).

The students were asked to reflect on the progress they made during their "bachelor's degree test", which is a graduation test in which the integration of different disciplines - linked to a practical problem - takes a central place. During a plenary briefing, the reflection assignments and the digital storytelling approach were explained and illustrated. To explain the digital storytelling approach, we used the guidelines of Lambert (2003) for writing a digital story.

The students were asked to do several reflection assignments, two of which involved writing a digital story (one with learner control and one without it). In contrast to the control condition, students in the no-control condition were asked to strictly apply a template. They had to prepare a PowerPoint presentation - with no other software - with a maximum of fifteen slides. These had to meet the following guidelines: limited animation, short texts, embedded images, but no sound recordings, music or moving images.

The students also were to reflect on specific competences, e.g. "the teacher as educator" or "the teacher as an innovator and as a researcher". Finally, the students were also asked to write a short additional report to clarify the point of view, the dramatic question, and the emotional content of the digital story.

Lecturers were informed about the study, but were not informed about the coding scheme that was used to define whether or not an element in a reflection assignment may be considered as a element of "critical reflection". Students were not told that their reflection assignments would be used for research.

There were two conditions (control and no control), which means that 88 reflection assignments were used in the analysis. The analysis focuses on the number of elements that refers to critical reflection. We consider an element in a reflection assignment as an element of critical reflection when it refers to in-depth reflection or in-breadth reflection. The sum of the elements that refers to in-depth or in-breadth reflection indicates the degree of critical reflection.

Because images are rather difficult to interpret without an explanation of the student, the additional report was used to analyze the digital stories. To avoid interference, a blind score was granted. After being analyzed, the documents were linked to the original conditions and inserted into an SPSS file. A one-way ANOVA (with exceedance probability of 0.05) is used with learner control as independent variable and the degree of critical reflection as dependent variable.

What results did you get, and how can they be used for learners?


Jean-Claude Callens: The analysis reveals that in general the reflections from only twelve students (27.3%) score on critical reflection. Under the condition with less learner control, only three students (6.8%) score on critical reflection; with more learner control, eleven students (25%).


Furthermore, the analysis reveals that 84.1 % of the 88 reflection assignments did not score on critical reflection; the mean score of the reflection assignments is 0.19 (SD=0.476).


A one-way ANOVA shows a significant, medium-strong main effect of learner control on the degree of critical refection (F(1, 86)=6.447; p=0.013). When students have more learner control, they score better on the degree of critical reflection (Mean = 0.32, SD = 0.601) than when they have less learner control (Mean = 0.07, SD = 0.255).


It is striking that students in this study have a very low score on critical reflection when they reflect by writing a digital story with the guidelines of Lambert. This result is consistent with research that reveals that not all (pre-service) teachers are led, through reflection on their own practice, to take a critical view of the structural or ideological context in which they are working (McIntyre, 1993). It also conforms with the research of King and Kitchener (2004) and Kreber (2004) that reveals that students do not always achieve a level at which they transform their own assumptions.

To conclude, the best score on critical refection in this study was obtained when students have more learner control over their digital stories. Therefore, if digital storytelling is used to support critical reflection, we recommend - based on the results of this study- giving learner control on (1) the competencies where students reflect and (2) on the layout of the digital stories. Furthermore, we recommend additional research on the digital-storytelling approach with linear (structured, step-by-step) guidelines.