THE AFFECTIVE RESPONSE TO PEER-PRODUCED, GEOSCIENCE MOVIES

Peer-produced educational movies have the potential to improve student learning because they can incorporate many benefits of collaborative learning in an eminently scalable form. By communicating in a common idiom and use of language, student produced movies may be more accessible to their novice peers than media or personal interaction with an instructor who does not share the same social and cultural background. However, our initial experiences showing short student movies suggest that students in large introductory undergraduate classes often have fundamentally divergent positive to negative emotional responses to peer-produced movies.

In order to identify the causes of these disparate reactions and their potential consequences for learning, we developed and applied a survey designed to assess students' affective and cognitive responses to the peer-produced movies. Series of mixed open and closed-ended survey questions were grouped to focus on students perceptions of the movie, perceptions of the moviemaker, and changes in attitude, interest and self-efficacy in the subject. The survey was administered to students in a large introductory class on Weather and Climate immediately after the showing of a 3 minute movie on cloud types and characteristics; the movie, an extra-credit project, had been created by a student from the same class during a previous semester. The movie, the survey and its approval from the University of Memphis Institutional Review Board can be found at the http://lurbano-5.memphis.edu/MovieClassroom/index.php/Affect-1 website.

Survey responses showed a good correlations between the amount students believed they learned from the movie, their assessment of it's entertainment value and their motivation and confidence in their ability to learn about Earth Science. There were however no significant relationships with demographic statistics suggesting socio-cultural affinities with the moviemaker did not affect students' opinions.