Teaching History With Movies: Maybe not Such a Hot Idea

Movies are powerfully influential on young minds (reference Joseph Goebbels).  Thus, it might surprise you, knowing what we do about movies playing loose with historical facts, that teachers, history teachers no less, are using them in the classroom to help teach history.  But, it’s not as bad as you might think.  Some teachers believe that by showing popular, historically based movies to their kids that the kids will gain a more vivid appreciation for the history they learn in textbooks (which frequently conflict with the movie versions of the same events).  These history teachers are partially right – probably not the good part of partially, but partially none the less.  A couple of guys from the University of Washington did a study on how students learn history with movies.  Here are the findings in summary:  

“We found that when information in the film was consistent with information in the text, watching the film clips increased correct recall by about 50 percent relative to reading the text alone,” explains Andrew Butler, a psychology doctoral student in Arts & Sciences. 

  

“In contrast, when information in the film directly contradicted the text, people often falsely recalled the misinformation portrayed in the film, sometimes as much as 50 percent of the time.” 

In other words, kids will remember the movie version of history before a textbook version whether the movies is accurate or not.  But, not all is lost.  An article in Scientific American Mind further explained the research to add that if a teacher warns the kids ahead of time about each part of the movie that is inaccurate, that the kids will be able to pick out those instances and correctly recall the textbook version of events.  But, it only works if the teacher is extremely specific ahead of time.  He must say something like “Watch for this scene where Marie Antoinette is standing on the balcony and how the crowd reacts to her.  It is inaccurate because… .” The teacher makes all the difference.  A teacher who assigns a textbook and a movie and expects the kids to pick fact from fiction might as well have just assigned the movie.  But a proactive teacher who warns his kids about what is wrong ahead of time will have students who gain the benefit of visualization and who learn historic facts.  It’s all in the teacher – not surprisingly. 

Experiment: Teach the true history of a significant world even.  Watch the movie version of that even at home with the kids and see who can pick out the most inaccuracies.