A common course activity used by emergency management faculty is the screening of Hollywood disaster films to provide students with an opportunity to apply key disaster concepts they have learned about in lectures. When college courses were abruptly moved online in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic began in the United States, emergency management…

Movies have long been used for teaching in undergraduate science courses. However, embedding movie references (EMR) in science videos is a new trend. This study explored how EMR in YouTube science videos might affect the nature of comments and the process of learning science. Using constructivist grounded theory, we compared comments on two…

At the end of a biology course entitled Ecology, Evolution, and Genetics, students were asked to consider how their learning experience had changed their perception of either ecology or genetics. Students were asked to express their thoughts in the form of a "digital story" using readily available software to create movies for the purpose of…

A recent survey of undergraduates at five schools across the United States indicates that many undergraduates feel that they have learned more about volcanic systems from Hollywood films and the popular media than they learned in the course of their precollegiate formal education. Scores on the Volcanic Concept Survey, an instrument designed to…

Science fiction films were used in required and elective nonmajor science courses as a pedagogical tool to motivate student interest in science and to reinforce critical thinking about scientific concepts. Students watched various films and critiqued them for scientific accuracy in written assignments. Students' perception of this activity was…

Reports on a study which attempts to evaluate the extent to which students can learn from a film and to show some ways in which the learning process can be improved. (Author/GS)

This paper discusses pedagogical advantages and challenges of using science-fiction movies and television shows in an introductory science class for elementary teachers. The authors describe two instructional episodes in which scenes from the movies "Red Planet" and "The Core" were used to engage students in critiquing science as presented in…

Reviews are presented which are designed for beginning undergraduates. The films are divided into two series: (1) Manipulation of Liquids and Solids, and (2) Chromatographic Separations and Spectorscopic Methods. Topics increase in complexity from one film to the next. (DF)

Describes a strategy that uses the analysis of movie plots to reveal the importance of biological issues to students. Concludes that pointing out the role of biology in familiar and popular cultural phenomena proved effective in reaching students who might otherwise have been intimidated by or prejudiced against science. (JRH)