Spring Saturday SAVY, Week 3, Media Mania: How We are Impacted by What We Watch (5th-6th)
Hello, media researchers and fans, alike!
It was bittersweet to finish the course yesterday, as we said goodbye to all your students and saw how much they learned over the past three weeks. Before diving into the work, we played a fun version of 20 questions. Students broke into groups and decided on a piece of media (digital or print) that they would then have their group members guess. We then proceeded to have the students count how many questions it took to guess each one. Once each group was finished, we put the most difficult answers in front of everyone and tried to figure them out as a whole group.
We then had each student take the time to create their own research study about media. They thought about what they observed in the world related to media, asked a question that led to a hypothesis, and then proceeded to design the individual components of their experiment. Students took this task seriously, asking important questions that were insightful and helpful for their fellow classmates. Students came up with fantastic ideas, ranging from the effect of Minecraft on aggression in children to how the type of media someone consumes influences their tennis skills to the way that Dance Moms changes young women’s respect of authority to how reading fiction vs. non-fiction books in childhood impacts intelligence in adulthood to the way that superhero films impact children’s imagination to how the show Bluey impacts social skills in comparison to Peppa Pig. We also discussed the individual parts of their research presentation, which they would be creating after doing some background research in the computer lab.
We spent the rest of the period before lunch in the computer lab and going onto Google Scholar. Students dove into academic literature about their research topics, learning from research papers often used by actual psychology and media researchers! It was incredible to see how much information they learned from this advanced content.
After lunch, we had the students get right into designing their research presentation poster with all the components they designed earlier in the day, along with the research they took from their time in the computer lab. Students crafted posters that were engaging and detailed, as well as easily understandable for an audience of people who were not as familiar with their research topic as they were.
It was wonderful getting to see these students be so actively engaged in this course over the last three weeks and to see each of them find their own unique interests in the worlds of media and psychology.
Thank you for a wonderful class!
