Fieldtrip: Using Internet-Based Multi-Media to Engage Teens on Education Issues

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): It is anticipated that only a third of today's high school students will go onto college despite consistent data that support the benefit of post-secondary education for individuals. Concurrently, daily Internet use among adolescents is nearing the fifty-percent mark, with broadband Internet steadily growing toward ubiquity. This project aims to leverage the maturing Internet to develop an effective means of helping disengaged teens build learning-related self-efficacy and motivation as part of their development. The effort builds on previous research and theories suggesting that the social and affective dimensions of a child are important factors in learning achievement. Our objective is to create an online community-based, episodic, video documentary, to engage teens. The story will key into teen concerns about finding their places in the world as independent adults. Older teens, acting as both co- researchers and filmmakers, will create video journals and conduct interviews to explore the ways in which people become successful adults. They will find and interview people in a range of challenging careers, who credit personal attributes, other than those commonly emphasized most in school, for their success. These might include the businessperson with strong "social skills," the space scientist with strong "mechanical skills" or the writer who excels at storytelling rather than grammar. Pilot data from focus groups in which teens saw and reacted to such media initially confirmed this approach. The objective is not so much to refer to a credible way of categorizing the diverse ways peoples' minds seem to succeed, but rather to explore the fact that they do succeed. Teens who see that a broad range of minds can be successful, may be more likely to re-evaluate their own potential and see their self-efficacy strengthened. In phase one of the research, investigators will seek only to measure and assess the dialog that is generated, and learn what aspects of the online video media best pique participants' interests. The specific aims are 1) to recruit and register a pool of participants, 2) design, build and staff an online community capable of couching the research, 3) recruit and train teen filmmakers, 4) produce and publish an ongoing episodic video documentary to be online for one month, 5) capture the text-based discussion it generates as well as interview and survey participants, and 6) analyze and report the data. Feasibility will be established by the amount and nature of pertinent discussion that the online community generates. An empirical feasibility threshold will be established as part of the data analysis; in that respect, the research is exploratory. The project is the result of a broadly interdisciplinary collaboration that includes expertise in psychology, information systems, economics, media development and history. This project will research the effectiveness of an online community to engage adolescents on education-related issues that affect their social and affective development. It acknowledges the growing trend of adolescent access to and use of broadband Internet media. It will feature interactive, episodic video, co-produced by teens and adults, that explores key questions concerning what creates successful adulthood. The video is intended to generate discussion among teen community members, which in turn, will influence the direction of the video and be captured for quantitative and qualitative analysis.