<p> The purpose of the study was to investigate whether storytelling can be utilized as an instructional strategy to enhance undergraduate learners’ critical thinking outcomes in an online general education Cinema course in the community college setting. The documented inability of undergraduate online learners to display adequate critical thinking skills in general education courses was identified as the area in need of further scholarly investigation. Storytelling served as the instructional strategy of choice due to its unifying quality of communicating information while creating memorable and lasting experiences. The research question guiding this project asked whether there is a difference between the critical thinking outcomes of undergraduate learners enrolled in an online general education Cinema course who are exposed to storytelling as an instructional strategy and learners who are not. The quasi-experimental quantitative design was employed to collect the participants’ critical thinking outcomes. Two sections of an <i>Introduction to Cinema</i> course, taught by the same instructor, were selected; one section served as the experimental group and the other section as the control group. The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal II (Watson-Glaser II) measurement instrument was used as an end of semester assessment. The participants were undergraduate online general education learners. The independent samples <i>t-</i>test was utilized to compare the means of two unrelated groups with the independent variable consisting of two categorical, independent groups. The findings revealed that there was no significant difference between the critical thinking outcomes of the experimental and control groups. Nevertheless, the mean of the experimental group’s critical thinking scores was higher than that of the control group and the standard deviation suggested a smaller range. Thus, there are indicators that if the number of the experimental group participants had been larger, there would have been a different result.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:10261122 |
| Date | 06 April 2017 |
| Creators | Roidi, Margaret M. |
| Publisher | Capella University |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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