Engaging students through storytelling: A fictitious crime project

This article presents a framework to promote creativity and critical thinking skills in students in a way that is both enjoyable and academically rigorous. The students are encouraged to imagine a crime scenario, as a pretext for exploring various scientific topics of their choice. The assignment empowers students to take charge of their own learning by focusing on a type of crime that they want to learn more about and describe its investigation. Throughout the semester, they practice divergent thinking and problem-solving as they consider various social and cultural factors that may affect their scenario. To ensure continuous progress, they provide information about their scenario for formative assessment throughout the semester. Shortly after the beginning of the semester, they choose a type of crime, its location, and the main characters involved (victim, investigative team, suspects). They eventually decide how the characters interact during the investigation, what evidence is recovered from the crime scene or from the suspects, how the evidence is collected and analyzed, and how the evidence leads to the apprehension of the perpetrator. Their plot must include two investigative errors, which challenges them to think what can go wrong during an investigation. The summative assessment evaluated both a written narrative and a class presentation of the crime scenario. To practice analysis and evaluation skills, all students use a rubric to assess all presentations. The project has been assigned in an introductory Forensic Science course for three semesters so far. The quality of student scenarios varied and correlated reasonably well with the student performance in other aspects of the course. The students enjoyed creating their own crime scenarios and trying to solve the scenarios imagined by their peers.