A framework, checklist and guidelines for motivating Arab children whilst using web-based story-writing tools

Abstract

Writing is an important skill for students, especially for children. Narrative writing is one of the strategies that is used as a pedagogical strategy for elementary school education to improve writing processes. Teachers use a narrative writing strategy as a mechanism to improve children’s ability generally in terms of their use of grammatical structures and to expand vocabulary. However, students need motivation to plan their ideas, draft, write, evaluate, edit, and proofread for spelling, diacritical marks and punctuation errors. For that, students are less motivated to write, as teacher commonly only use unattractive and unchallenging activities to arouse their interest in writing. Digital storytelling/storywriting is considered an effective way to enhance students’ skills, such as writing. A variety of available offline and online tools can be used to create or write digital stories in education. No study has been conducted to explore the components that can motivate children’s in web-based story-writing. Exploring the different requirements to motivate children from the different aspects, psychological, cultural, educational and technical may help show how web-based story-writing tools could be designed for Arab children to become more motivated. Moreover, it can help teachers to choose an appropriate web-based story-writing tool for their students. Therefore, it is important for teachers to know what is an appropriate web-based tool for children, as well as the developer to know what to build into the Arabic web-based tools, in order to motivate children into the activities. This research proposes a framework to identify the requirements that motivate children whilst using web-based story-writing tools. This framework explores the requirements that motivate children based on theories and best practice of psychological, cultural, educational, and technical perspectives. The framework has been validated through using triangulation: a literature review, experts’ review, and a survey with people who work closely with children. This research develops a checklist for Arab teachers to assess an appropriate web-story-writing tool that can motivate children. For validation, the checklist went through a series of tests, and the test results found that the checklist was reliable. Following the development and validation of the framework and checklist, guidelines were developed and validated by focus group discussions. The outcome of this research has provided recommendations for future designs of web-based story-writing tools.

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ORCID for Gary Wills: orcid.org/0000-0001-5771-4088

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