An investigation on how designing video advertisements influences secondary school students´ perception of learner autonomy

This paper reports on the implementation of video production during curriculum time with 14 year-old students. The purpose of this study is to describe and analyse how secondary school students produce video clips that influence their perception of learner autonomy. A major component of the intervention is a digital video production project where students create video clips of advertisements. The intervention is based on the Creative Problem Solving (CPS): The Thinking Skills Model (TSM). It combines elements of critical and reflective thinking exercises as part of the multimodal composition process. Data drawn from students´ accounts provide evidence that at different stages of the video production, there were varying opportunities for students to exercise their capacities as autonomous learners. We found that interplay of the creativity arising through the CPS model and digital video production holds a powerful affective capacity for students´ sense making and construction of identities. In addition, results from the Personal Performance Profile (Maurice Gibbons, 2008) support and highlight the potential that such media rich environment fosters language learner autonomy, particularly in self-regulation.