Research Article

STORYBOARDING AS TEACHING PRACTICE AND ASSESSMENT TECHNIQUE IN TEACHER TRAINING: A SURVEY STUDY

ABSTRACT

This study investigated in-service teachers’ instructional design performances in designing storyboards for Serious Games through some tools and planning procedures crafted by the team of Erasmus+ project Ecological Learning and Simulation Environments in Higher Education (ELSE – 2018-1-IT02-KA203-048006). The ELSE project was promoted and coordinated by Università della Tuscia (IT) for the span of the past three years and included a consortium of ten universities, among which IBU (N. Macedonia). As part of a flexible toolkit to be used by academic tutors to design and deliver lessons, one of the Intellectual Outputs envisaged the production of a digital editor (ECORE) for the creation of learning games (Serious Games) to be destined to academic teaching environments. The experience carried out during the ELSE project has inspired a related yet more specific issue connected to the pre- and in-service teacher training initiatives organized by the Tuscia partner: i.e., could storyboarding be adopted within an effective teaching practice and as a learning assessment technique in teacher training? Significant indicators and qualitative data, supporting a subsequent structured research project, were collected through an explorative survey conducted on in-service teachers engaged in a Training Course for Special Needs Teachers (SNT), in the A.Y. 2019-20. After playing a Serious Game created by the project team, this group of 40 teachers produced storyboards to simulate further typical school situations at all levels. The analysis of their products revealed a relevant educational potential for the practice of storyboarding as a teaching/learning strategy and provided practical indications in favour of the research hypothesis.

Keywords

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN SERIOUS GAMES STORYBOARDING