Quality Assessment for Digital Stories by Young Authors

Digital storytelling, an innovative way of writing, has been introduced to young learners who are taught to construct stories with digital tools to convey their knowledge and ideas. In 2018 and 2019, 31 digital stories created by Hong Kong primary school students were published on a digital story writing platform and linked from an online gamified reading platform. Each book on average gained 4,000+ views from across the globe and received 3,000+ favorable comments in total. While the digital stories are popular in these platforms, their quality and education value are uncertain. A review of the literature shows there is a lack of robust tools for assessing digital stories by young authors. The research team for this paper thus constructed their own framework in evaluating digital stories. An assessment of the stories has been done by two capable assessors, who found that the stories overall were of good quality and suggested room for improvement. This paper made three contributions: (1) “invention” of a digital story assessment framework; (2) it shows that stories created by students (with support from educators) can be an enjoyable and useful educational resource for their peers; and (3) digital storytelling can help foster the development of young authors.