سعید شاه حسینی

The environmental crisis is increasing today and this makes it imperative for people more than ever to expand their understanding of the environmental concepts. Accordingly, films can be an effective tool to do that, but finding the right medium is a matter of debate. Needless to say, different forms of films have different effects. Within the same line, the current paper aims to test out the effectiveness of narrative and non-narrative documentary films on the learning and retention of the environmental concepts. The research method was quasi-experimental, administering a pre-test and a post-test on 20 male and 20 female participants between 20-27 years old. The samples were randomly categorized into two groups. Both groups had an equal number of participants who did not have any earlier  environmental activities and their majors were not related to environment and natural resources studies. They were from a variety of educational backgrounds. The groups were homogenous in terms of GPA, too. Firstly, the pre-test was administered to both groups. One group watched a narrative documentary on environmental and natural resources for 8 weeks, while the other group watched the non-narrative version of the same film for the same period. Then, a learning and retention test was given to both groups. The MANCOVA test was administered on the data and the findings showed a significant difference between the two groups in terms of learning and retention. It was concluded that narrative films can have a more significant effect on the learning and retention of the variables.

One of the most important recent concerns in the world is the environment and its protection. Environmental education by storytelling, which is based on children's thinking mechanisms, can be considered a method for child education. This study was conducted with the aim of investigating the effectiveness of teaching environmental concepts through animism-based storytelling on children's environmental knowledge and attitude. The research is quasi-experimental, including two groups (experimental and control), a pre-test and a post-test. The statistical population includes all the first-grade elementary school students of Shazand, Markazi Province, Iran, in the academic year 2021-2022, with 17 people in each group selected by convenience sampling. The instrument was Leeming's (1995) questionnaire, which includes two subscales of environmental knowledge and environmental attitude. Data analysis was carried out using multivariate covariance analysis. The findings indicated that there is a significant difference between the environmental knowledge and attitude of the experimental group and the control group. The results indicated that presenting environmental concepts using animism-based storytelling had a significant effect on children's environmental knowledge and attitude. In conclusion, although storytelling can generally affect knowledge and attitude, animism-based storytelling has a more significant effect on children's environmental knowledge and attitude