As part of the critical thinking standards, in the social studies curriculum in Ms. Malek's primary grade classroom, students are studying the effect media messages have on people. Students are learning about the ways in which commercial messages influence people's buying decisions. Students learn several of the "tricks and techniques" that marketers use to appeal to young children, such as making toys seem far more fun than they might realistically be; using movie stars or cartoon characters; or making products look bigger than they really are.
As a culminating activity, the students devise an experiment for seeing how commercials affect people. They decide to create different commercials for a fictitious game called Solar Escape. Students share responsibility for creating the materials for the game: cardboard spaceships, a colorful board, etc. Students then divide into teams and each team is comprised of a writer, videographer, and editor. Each team works to create a commercial.
One team creates a very factual commercial for the game, simply describing Solar Escape as a game that takes about 20 minutes to play and is appropriate for children ages 6 through 9. The other teams each create a commercial using one of the marketing techniques they studied. All the commercials are videotaped very simply using the video camera built into their laptops and the Windows Movie Maker software. They upload the commercials to a website Ms. Malek has set-up for them using Weebly.
Ms. Malek's students then create a survey using FluidSurveys to use in determining how their commercials affect people. As customary when Ms. Malek introduces her students to a new digital tool or application, she ensures her students have an opportunity to download this new application and to become familiar with how to use it, prior to their development of their survey questions. (Her students had previous experience creating videos.)
The subjects of their experiment - the people whose survey responses they will collect - are drawn from the other three classrooms at their grade level. Thirty student volunteers are identified and view each of the commercials by accessing the website. After each commercial is shown, the volunteers use smartphones or tablets to respond to three simple questions in the survey about Solar Escape, including, "After watching this commercial, how likely would you be to ask your parents to buy this game?" Ms. Malek's students track the results in real time as volunteers complete the survey. They can view the results in aggregate and look closely at individual responses. As soon as they begin collecting responses, they use FluidSurveys to automatically start to generate charts, graphs and stats. Ms. Malek finds that her students are so interested in the results of the survey, that they continue tracking the results after school.
In class, Ms. Malek's students share the summary charts, graphs and stats from their survey by displaying them on their tablets or smartphones. Based on this data, Ms. Malek leads a discussion that explores which commercials are the most likely to lead to purchases. Students then use their laptops to individually write up the results of the experiment, describing the method they used to conduct the study incorporating the data in the form of charts or graphs, along with a few sentences describing what they learned. They post them on the website to compare what each other learned. Ms. Malek uses these reports to evaluate how well students learned content for this learning activity.
In addition students complete an evaluation of their peers for each student's collaboration and contribution to the team.
Finally, Ms. Malek uses a simple media project rubric, based on an original found online at Rubistar and refined for her needs, to evaluate the quality of each teams' commercial.