Remember the 1984 Civil War film Glory with Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman, and Denzel Washington? It told the true story of the Massachusetts 54th Infantry, a fighting unit made up entirely of African-Americans. What a great way to make history come alive for students! Right?

Yes and no, according to researchers at Washington University in St. Louis. In a small study due to be published soon in the journal Psychological Science, graduate psychology student Andrew C. Butler and his colleagues find that teaching history with popular films can be a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, the researchers found, students really do recall more factual information (50 percent more, in fact) when they read text and watch a movie than they do when they read the text alone. But when the information in the movie conflicts with the historical facts in the text, students are more likely to remember the film version, regardless of whether it's correct.

And Hollywood movies are apparently rife with such historical inaccuracies, according to the study. The movie, Glory, for example, depicts the soldiers in the 54th as recently freed slaves from the South when, in fact, they were Northern freemen. (For a heads up on other historical errors in commercial films, check out this slide show at the Wash U Website.)

It turns out that such mistaken notions, once formed, are tough to shake: Students held on to the movie misinformation even when told beforehand that the film clips they were about to see were fictional! Fewer students retained misinformation, though, when their teachers were more specific about the inaccuracies they would see, saying, for instance, that "the film presented it this way but it really happened like this..."

This study was conducted with 54 undergraduate psychology students whose factual recall was measured on tests taken a week later. It's not unreasonable to think, though, that the dynamics would be different for high school and middle school students.

So, teachers, carefully screen those popular films for misinformation before you show them in class. But you were probably doing that already, weren't you?

Though not yet published, the full study, "Using Popular Films to Enhance Classroom Learning" is already posted online and can be accessed for a fee at Psychological Science.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The popularity of crossword puzzles and Sudoku attests to the fact that thinking can, in fact, be quite entertaining. Yet most kids don't enjoy school, the one place they come for the purpose of learning to think. What gives?

Daniel T. Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia, attempts to answer that question in a new book published by Jossey-Bass. Appropriately titled Why Don't Students Like School?, the book boils down findings from hundreds of studies in cognitive science into nine principles to guide practicing classroom teachers. Willingham is experienced at doling out this sort of nuts-and-bolts advice. He writes the Ask the Cognitive Scientist column for AFT's American Educator magazine.

Even though humans are naturally curious, Willingham says in his book, they are not naturally good thinkers.

Thinking is slow and unreliable work. Nevertheless, people enjoy mental

work if it is successful. People like to solve problems, but not to work on unsolvable problems. If schoolwork is always just a bit too difficult for a student, it should be no surprise that she doesn't like school much.

Some of the book's lessons will come as a surprise to advocates of teaching approaches that emphasize critical thinking and analysis over content knowledge. Willingham says his reading of the research shows that such skills require extensive factual knowledge first.

Willingham also champions the evil twins of "drill and practice," pointing out that practice is necessary because it reduces the amount of "room" that the mind has to do its mental work. The trick for teachers is to use practice more effectively, spacing it out, for instance, or embedding it in teaching more advanced skills.

The professor is also no fan of the popular idea that children are born with multiple, distinct intelligences, such as musical intelligence. He prefers to think of most of those qualities as abilities. "Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn," he writes.

The science here is highly readable and, yes, even entertaining in a Sudoku-kind of way. For a more extensive review of the book, see this article from the WSJ online.

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