What should a wildebeest say? Interactive nature films for high school classrooms

Abstract

Nature documentaries play an important role in high school biology classrooms, yet they deliver a passive and biased account of the behavior of organisms. To engage students in more active problem solving around behavioral topics, we created an interactive video system called Animal Landlord. Part of a week-long curriculum designed to introduce concepts in behavioral ecology, Animal Landlord presents film clips of the Serengeti lion hunting its prey. Students select and annotate video frames with explanations of their significance to the hunt, compare annotations across films, and ultimately generalize a qualitative model of predation behaviors. This paper discusses the motivations for changing the nature of documentary use in the classroom, the ways in which we change the form of traditional narration for pedagogical purposes, and the interactivity that emerges in the social context of the classroom. INTRODUCTIONNew reform efforts in education (e.g., [17]) attempt to move students away from passive textbook and lecture activities by advocating more student-directed activities. Providing students with rich problem settings in which they can engage in iterative hypothesis generation and testing and explanation of causal relationships may result in more productive learning that shallow exposure to a broad base of content [4,23]. Many computerbased learning environments have been developed to provide interactive settings for students to engage in realistic activities.

Constructivism.

“…In particular, the data suggest that after completing the unit, students make fewer unwarranted inferences and are better at formulating coherent explanations ( Reiser et al, 2001 ;Sandoval, 1998 ). Similar results were found with the Animal Landlord software ( Smith & Reiser, 1997 ). A comparison of pre-and posttest essay questions also found that students ' essays on the posttest contained more causal arguments and a greater proportion of justifi ed points than students ' essays on the pretests ( Smith & Reiser, 1997 ).…”

National Geographic unplugged

“…We have collected dam in the form of student and teacher interviews, work products, classroom video, and pm/post tests. We are still analyzing these data, and we have reported results from our final user trial concerning the prelpost tests elsewhere [19]. The open-ended essay questions used in the prelpost tests were drawn Corn university-level biology examinations and administered to students before and after the Animal Landlord intervention.…”

Identifying potential types of guidance for supporting student inquiry when using virtual and remote labs in science: a literature review

“…Finally, a scaffold similar to the Data Interpretation scaffold (BGuILE) could be used for asking students questions to guide their interpretation of the data (Smith and Reiser 1997). While this tool was not supported by empirical evidence (see Table 4), we believe it could be valuable for students.…”