Have you been mulling over the idea of using science fiction films in your classes? Science fiction in college STEM teaching seems like a natural fit—many students and professors enjoy modern science fiction films, contemporary special effects-laden action sequences naturally capture students’ attention, and today’s college students, in particular, seem to respond positively to short video clips for instruction. In fact, surveys show that college students use Internet sources like YouTube on nearly a daily basis to get information.
It seems that contemporary college students would fully expect their professors to use some form of video as part of instruction. Correspondingly, a natural extension of this idea is that STEM professors should be inclined to use science fiction movies to teach foundational scientific concepts in the natural sciences. At the same time, we do observe some degree of reluctance on STEM professors’ parts to use science fiction video clips in their teaching. This reluctance is due to several factors, all of which could be overcome. For one, few professors have the technological know-how to make short video clips, although it is becoming increasingly easy to insert a video into PowerPoint and then edit the video within that program, or one similar. For another, many professors are largely unsure what they can and cannot use as educational fair use from sources like YouTube due to a dizzying array of copyright infringement myths. But, the number one barrier to using science fiction in the STEM classroom is based on negative experiences with prior trials.
The most common misapplied instructional strategy first-time professors misuse by including videos and movies in their teaching is to assign the viewing of an entire 2-hour movie. For most students, this is akin to assigning students to passively watch a 2-hour lecture—which is similarly highly ineffective for teaching. The second problem that professors have when using video is that they fail to provide sufficient pre-flight and post-flight structures for students to use to process what they are watching. There are many distractions simultaneously going on in a movie—character evolution and interactions, exploding special effects, haunting background music, and, of course, the main storyline plot. With all of these things, it is no wonder that students rarely know how to pay attention to a scientific concept being illustrated. Taken together, this is a recipe for a teaching failure.
Additionally, there is one enormous challenge professors need to take into account when using science fiction video in the classroom—students are still novices at science! The most frequent misuse of science fiction movies in teaching is when a teacher says, “tell me what is scientifically inaccurate about this movie.” The pedagogical conflict here is that novice science students barely know what the correct science is, let alone what is incorrect science. In other words, I remain unconvinced that the best use of science fiction in the teaching of science is to use it to highlight and illustrate bad examples of scientific portrayals.
Fortunately, there is an easy-to-implement three-step solution for professors to use that is focused on maintaining principles of active learning and, simultaneously, highlights accurate portrayals of science. The first step is to only use very short—5 minutes maximum—video clips so as not to overwhelm students and focus on a single scientific concept.
The second step is to provide considerable structure before and after showing the video. In much the same way that we know that classroom demonstrations are most effective when students know what they are supposed to be watching for and making pre-demonstration predictions about what will happen and why before the professor conducts the demonstration, videos best work when they are sandwiched by carefully written pre-flight and post-flight instructions. Worksheets to be completed during the video work really well for this.
The third step is to provide students with closure—what is it that they thought they were going to see before the video, what they saw when they watched the video, and how this directly relates to the scientific concept being taught—that includes an assessment of the learning.
Popular media has never before been more frequently and readily accessed by students and the general public. For many, mobile cell phones, tablets, computers, and Internet-linked smart televisions makes video access a nearly daily activity. It is irresponsible for STEM professors to simply to turn to popular media as a classroom babysitter and blindly hope that learner will gain something transformative from the experience. Instead, for video to be used in classrooms successfully, it must have a clearly specified and explicitly specific purpose that is explained to students.
Tim Slater, University of Wyoming, Tim@CAPERteam.com
Suggested citation: Slater, T. F. (2019, April). Using science fiction to teach science. Society of College Science Teachers Blog, 4(9), https://www.scst.org/blog
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