Session Description
The purpose of this project was to design and evaluate a web-based workshop created to help first-year college students learn how to write meaningful and organized personal statements for scholarship applications. The project was motivated by the needs of students in The Waiʻaleʻale Project, a First-Year Experience Program at Kauaʻi Community College, who often believe college is not for them because of various personal challenges. For example, during the 2019 – 2020 school year, less than 14% of the program’s students received scholarships requiring a personal statement. To address this problem, a web-based workshop was designed combining Hawaiian culture with storytelling to promote connections between students’ personal experiences and the requirements of personal essay writing. The instruction was evaluated by having 14 (n = 14) students from the program participate in the workshop. The results indicated that the web-based workshop, grounded in culture, improved participants’ levels of confidence in creating a personal statement and increased the prospect of students submitting higher-quality scholarship submissions. This presentation will discuss making connections for students using cultural significance and storytelling to help first-year at-risk college students to find growth mindset through as they complete their personal statement for scholarship applications.
Presenter(s)
- Kalei Carvalho, Learning Design and Technology, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa ,Kapaʻa, Hawaiʻi, USA