Kou Moʻolelo: Your Story, Your Personal Statement

Abstract

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. These students often believed college was not for them because of various personal challenges. Despite the ability to create compelling personal statements using these challenges, less than 14% of the program’s students received scholarships that required a personal statement during the 2019 – 2020 school year. The researcher designed a web-based workshop to address this problem. The workshop combined Hawaiian culture with storytelling to form connections between students’ personal experiences and essay writing requirements. The instruction was evaluated by having 17 students (n = 17) participate in the workshop. The results indicated that the web-based workshop, grounded in culture, improved participants’ confidence levels to create a personal statement and increased the prospect of submitting higher-quality scholarship applications.