Educational Media Reviews Online

Insight Media has created a number of short, closed captioned films addressing the research process. This fills a need as there are few current DVDs on this subject available for purchase. This particular offering describes the scientific method and focuses on observational and correlational experiments. The authors point out that to determine cause and effect an experimental design would be needed, but they describe the situations in which observational and correlational studies would be useful. Observational studies can be used to gather preliminary data and are, in general, less time consuming and expensive than other studies. Researchers interviewed in this film explain measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode), variability, kurtosis (shape) in the visual display of results, as well as measures of skewness and shape distribution. An amazing amount of information is delivered in a short period of time and the combination of narration and interview works well. This is a valuable resource and would be a good addition to high-school and college libraries.