Everyone likes movies. My 13-year old daughter spends so much time watching movies that I've been encouraging her to consider a career as a film critic (she's partial to musicals and romantic comedies but carries a torch for the vampires in Twilight, too). DVDs, Netflix, and the hundreds of channels on almost any TV make movies easily accessible all the time. As mind-candy, a vehicle for art, or a way to escape life's duller moments, that's fine. And many movies are educational or so some people believe-but how educational? Where's the proof? There's the rub.
When I was a graduate student, my office was near a kindly older professor who liked to illustrate psychological concepts through film. A twinkle in his eye, he routinely shuffled off to class with a film canister or two tucked under his arm. With pride he noted that students around campus knew him as the "Metro-Goldywn-Mayer of psychology." You see, Dr. MGM frequently showed movies often-and I don't mean illustrative clips lasting a few minutes and peppered throughout a lecture (this way long before YouTube). I mean full-length Hollywood films which easily filled the 3 or so 50-min lectures in a given week of a course's classes. Yes, he lectured, too, but not as much as he did earlier in his career. No one complained about his particular pedagogy, however, and students filled his classes. I just assumed that they knew-as I supposed-that little real learning was happening and that MGM was just passing time until retirement.
During my salad days as an assistant professor, I rarely showed movies except the occasional engaging demonstrating experimental design (you can never explain the difference between independent and dependent variables too many times or in too many ways-and no one really gets random assignment the first time) or one of the great dramatic hits of psychology (Milgram's obedience to authority study, the Zimbardo Prison Experiment). I thought most films were not an effective use of class time, that lecture or discussion was a better way for students to learn. After all, wasn't a real life me engaging in scholarly banter in the front of the room a better source of knowledge than, say, Tom Hanks? After all, I was there to answer questions and offer encouragement, wasn't I? Celluloid Tom couldn't do that. Years later, the ubiquity of "smart" classroom hasn't convinced me to change my Luddite ways, either.
Here's the problem: My skepticism regarding the educational benefits of films might be, well, wrong. A study by Andrew Butler and colleagues published in the September 2009 issue of the journal Psychological Science explores the use of popular films to boost student learning. The study's authors wanted to know whether watching popular history films (which often contain distortions aimed at making the past more compelling) affected people's abilities to recall related readings. In one study, researchers wanted to determine whether warning viewers to be on the look out for historically false facts would effect learning (i.e., could students appropriately reconcile valid readings with dramatizations where liberties might have been taken). The students read nine short texts linked to nine clips from popular historical films (e.g., Amadeus, Glory, The Last Samurai). Sometimes they were warned generally or specifically to look out for errors, other times not at all. One week later they returned and completed an online recall test about they read and saw.
The good news: Watching clips along with reading improved students' memory for facts than did reading by itself-and whether or not any "watch out" warnings were issued. So, accurate and relevant movies may bolster learning. The not-so-good news: When clip content contradicted readings, the students frequently recalled misinformation propagated by the entertaining, if inaccurate, films. Worse still, viewers were quite confident the false facts were accurate. Only when a specific warning was issued did students get it right. Not surprisingly, perhaps, readings supported by accompanying clips were rated as more interesting than the others. More research need to be done, of course, but this is a fine start.
Because everyone does like movies, what's a teacher to do? Marry clips carefully to readings and when the facts in both don't jibe, clearly point out the contradiction and the truth. And when watching films with the family, you might establish the accuracy of their content in advance (remember, there is no evidence that Mozart was gas-lighted by Antonio Salieri). Where learning from the moves is concerned, forewarned may be forearmed.
