Following on from yesterday's post about communicating research results to the general public, I read this 2018 article I found by Lara Goudsouzian (DeSales University), published in the Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education (open access). Goudsouzian discusses the use of movie trailers as a way to quickly introduce new topics for students (in biology, presumably). The paper doesn't include a lot of detail, but apparently the Apple iMovie app is able to easily create movie trailers based on photographs or video clips using one of several templates (and the process is described here). Goudsouzian created five trailers over a semester long course, and then her students:
...were asked to self-report their attitudes toward the movie trailer introductions using a five-point Likert scale...
The results are summarised in Figure 2 from the article:
It's pretty clear that students found the trailers to be interesting, unique and unexpected, and that they increased students' interest in the topics. However:
While some students did report using the movie trailers to study for exams, most disagreed with the assertion that the movie trailers could be used as a study tool for summative assessments...
That much is obvious from the bottom bar in the figure. Goudsouzian tries to argue that an increase in student interest would lead to higher student engagement, which in turn leads to greater learning, but I'd like to see some actual evidence of that before I believe it. However, Goudsouzian does offer this in the conclusion:
Rather than creating movie trailer introductions for students, instructors might choose to assign this work to students, as a way of familiarizing them with the topic before entering the class or as a means to review the material after it has already been covered.
That's very similar to this example I linked to in yesterday's post. And it makes me wish that I had read this article a couple of months ago, when planning how to approach flexible assessment in my ECONS101 and ECONS102 classes. We have adopted weekly video reflections for the trimester starting shortly (as one of two options for students, the other being in-class tests). However, an alternative might have been getting students to create trailers for each topic (having said that, the brief for a video reflection is open-ended enough that a trailer could satisfy the requirements, and would be pretty novel and interesting for the tutors to grade). We definitely need assessment items that make it more difficult for students to cheat (see here for more on that point).
Reducing the opportunities for cheating is not the only reason to consider alternative types of assessment. Finding novel ways for teachers to keep students engaged is also important, and one way to keep students engaged is to have engaging assessments. In ECON100, we used to have a group video assignment, until it got to the stage where the novelty had clearly worn off and the students weren't taking it seriously (I linked to the last winning videos here). At that point, we ditched the video assignment and we haven't brought it back since. The takeaway is that every so often we need to refresh our assessment styles (if not our teaching styles). That not only keeps the students engaged, but gives us as teachers a chance to try something a little different. And even if only for that purpose, movie trailers may be a good option.
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