“The Reality of it All”: History Students Read the Movies

Abstract

What and how do students learn about history from motion pictures? How does this knowledge interact with the history they learn in school? This is a complex problem space that has seen little empirical research. To lay the groundwork for addressing these questions, we describe two exploratory studies. The first study takes a broad view, using interviews and classroom observations to scrutinize the use of movies in two high school history classrooms. The second study focuses more narrowly on a small group of students who view two movie excerpts, then think aloud while reading a selection of historical texts, and later while answering an essay question. Another group engages in the same task, but without viewing the film excerpts. Provisional conclusions are reached about the influence of movies on high school students' understandings of the past, and suggestions are made for the direction of future research.