Executive Director of Training and Learning Georgia Institute of Technology, United States
Introduction:: Storytelling interventions have a long history of offering a range of positive benefits (Cummings et al., 2022; Ritter et al., 2019; Robertson et al., 2019), across a range of disciplines (i.e., psychology, medicine, education, etc.). However, the use of personal stories in higher education (i.e., Story-Driven Learning) has been historically under-explored, particularly in engineering education. As such, we decided to investigate student impact from a newly required course ("The Art of Telling Your Story") in the biomedical engineering department at Georgia Institute of Technology, in order to better understand the effect of Story-Driven Learning on the student experience.
Materials and Methods:: In total, we had 48 biomedical engineering student participants. Of those participants, 36 students had never taken "The Art of Telling Your Story" (i.e., the control group) and 17 students were enrolled in "The Art of Telling Your Story" that semester (i.e., the experimental group). We administered two Qualtrics surveys to participants: 1) during the first week of classes in the Spring 2023 semester and 2) during the last week of classes in the Spring 2023 semester. At both time points, participants completed: 1) demographic questions, 2) self-report measures (on self-concept clarity, self-esteem, empathy, awareness of narrative identity, entrepreneurial mindset, happiness, depression, anxiety, and meaning in life), and 3) two written narrative prompts (on a turning point and what drives them in life). The written narratives, from both the pre- and post-test surveys, were then coded for five narrative themes (redemption, contamination, agency, self-concept clarity, and autobiographical reasoning).
Results, Conclusions, and Discussions:: The data was analyzed to determine if there was any change in either 1) self-report scores and/or 2) how participants told their stories. Moreover, we were interested specifically in seeing if changes were occurring at a greater rate in the experimental (class) group than in the control (non-class) group. While the class group showed greater improvements across nearly all the self-report measures than the non-class group, the class group showed a significantly greater improvement in anxiety symptoms than the non-class group. Lastly, a greater interest in the class (at the end of the semester) was positively associated with a greater awareness of narrative identity. Coding of the narrative themes will be finished in the next month, at which point we will be able to determine the extent to which class participants changed in their narration of personal stories--as well as if that change in narration is associated with changes in any of the self-report measures.
Early analysis of this data suggest ways in which Story-Driven Learning improved student outcomes and can be used to more directly target students' personal development. However, our smaller sample size means that our results can only be considered as exploratory. For future directions, we will be implementing this research on a broader scale during the Fall 2023 semester, at which point we will be able to more holistically determine the full impact of Story-Driven Learning on biomedical engineering students.
