Digital Storytelling as a Cross-Curricular School Practice: Language Proficiency, Science Communication, and Creative Expression Outcomes in Middle School Students of Ahmedabad

Abstract

Digital storytelling — the practice of creating short digital narrativescombining personal or investigative content with images, audio, video, andtext in a structured narrative arc — has emerged as a cross-curricular school practice with potential to simultaneously develop language proficiency, science communication skills, and creative expression competencies through a single integrated student activity. This quasi-experimental study compared outcomes across three dimensions — language proficiency, science communication, and creative expression — between 98 Class 8 students engaging in a 12-week digital storytelling programme integrating English and Science content and 98 matched comparison students in conventional instruction, across four schools in Ahmedabad. The digital storytelling group created five individual digital stories over the 12-week period, each requiring scientific investigation, English narrative writing, and digital media production. Post-test assessments showed significantly larger gains in the digital storytelling group across all three outcome dimensions: language proficiency (+9.6 pp DiD, p < 0.001), science communication (+12.2 pp, p < 0.001), and creative expression (+17.6 pp, p < 0.001), with the largest advantage in creative expression — consistent with the digital storytelling medium's unique affordances for multimodal creative production. These findings support digital storytelling as a cost-accessible, multidisciplinary school practice that simultaneously advances academic and creative competencies across English and Science subject domains.  KEYWORDS:Digital storytelling, Cross-curricular practice, Language proficiency, Science communication, Creative expression, Middle school,Gujarat, Multidisciplinary pedagogy, Educational technology