Students' Engagement in Educational Software: A Comparison between Narrative and Traditional Styles

Abstract

 Abstract—This paper presents a survey study that explores the difference between an educational software based on a narrative style and another based on a traditional style in terms of students' engagement. For this investigation, two different questionnaires were distributed to students in two different crucial stages. In the first stage, a questionnaire was given to students to find out information about the stories they are reading in general and their desired story characteristics. An educational software based on both the preferred character and narrative style was developed for the purpose of this study. Then, another questionnaire was distributed to explore students' perceptions about both software styles. It is found that the educational software based on the narrative style better facilitate students' engagement comparing with educational software based on traditional style taken into account the kind of the character and story.