Young Researchers' Use Of The 'Our Story' App To Create Multimedia Experiential Research Narratives: Putting 'Me' Back Into Accounts Of Research Process

To date, the Open University's Children's Research Centre has focused on supporting young people in conducting their own social research projects, culminating in the production of formal research reports and/or presentations. However, the formal nature of these reports and presentations means that some important details of the research process (e.g. the iterative development of data collection tools or accounts of the joys and frustrations experienced) are rendered invisible. This means that some of the details of the young researchers' developing understanding of research process and research skills remain unappreciated and undervalued. It is argued here that the hidden details of a young researchers experiences are of potential value to educators, for example, as indicators of a young researcher's progress and developing understanding. The current pilot study attempted to go some way to address this issue by evaluating the extent to which a multimedia narrative format supported by the 'Our Story' app - can be used by young researchers to mediate their creation and sharing of stories that document their experiential research journeys. Seven young researchers aged 12 years who were attending an after-school social researchers club in England were loaned an iPad and given an opportunity to use Our Story (OS). A mixed methods approach was adopted to evaluating the utility of OS: the research stories were collected and subject to a content analysis, one case study story underwent a multimodal semiotic analysis, and semi-structured interviews carried out with the young researchers were subject to thematic analysis. Findings suggest that the stories were hybrid in nature; they contained details of research process (e.g. the order in which tasks were undertaken), research activities (e.g. the drafting of questionnaire items) and subjective experiences (e.g. joy at completing data collection). The young researchers talked about the potential of Our Story for supporting their production of a sharable record of personal achievement and enjoyment - they were a way of putting 'me' back into accounts of conducting research. It can be concluded that the stories revealed some of the hidden intricacies of conducting research that are valuable for educators as well as being of value to the young researchers themselves. Future research will build on suggestions for improving the app further and focus on the development and evaluation of research story templates and video in Our Story to further enhance its potential.