Design • Multimedia Lesson • 2022

EYEWITNESS NEWS

Unreliability of Eyewitness Testimony Learning Design

About Eyewitness News

American jurors place immense weight on the testimony of eyewitnesses. However, perception, memory, and bias can sometimes lead eyewitnesses astray in their identifications. To educate undergraduate students about this complex but critical topic, my team designed a multimedia lesson proposal about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, exploring how various video clips, images, graphs, and text descriptions could be combined to deliver a high-quality learning experience.

Our narrated walkthrough explores our design and instructional decisions in depth:

For a closer look at the slides, references, and additional resources featured in our video, feel free to explore our slide deck:

Learning Journey

We outlined each phase of our learners' journey as they explore the topic of eyewitness testimony fallibility, both inside and outside of class.

Pre-Class Activity

We determined our lesson should first incorporate pre-class work, which would allow learners to engage in pre-training about memory and eyewitness identification before delving deeply into the class content. One of these activities would include watching this clip from Better Call Saul.

Warm-Up Activity

Our in-class lesson would start with an advance organizer about optical illusions. This advance organizer would activate learners' prior knowledge about perception and prime them for the remainder of the lesson content. The second warm-up activity would consist of analyzing a video clip that simulates a real eyewitness scenario. Later in the class, this clip would serve as an eyewitness test for the undergraduates.

Instructional Activity

The main focus of our lesson would consist of a motion-graphics "explainer" video with strategic pause-and-reflect points. This content is explored in detail in our final lesson plan video walkthrough.

Peer Activity

After exploring the content in the explainer video, students would engage in an in-class mock trial, inspired by an American Bar Association activity, to further grapple with the topic of eyewitness testimony.

Post-Class Activity

To round out the lesson, learners would work in groups to apply their knowledge about memory, perception, and eyewitness testimony to a case study.

Learning Objectives

Using Bloom's Taxonomy, we established learning objectives for our undergraduate students about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.

Goal:

Demonstrate the ability to critically examine and reflect upon the reliability of eyewitness testimony in the judicial process.

Objectives:

1. Understand the influence of perception, bias, and memory on the accuracy of eyewitness accounts

2. Critique the handling of eyewitness testimony in a case

3. Generate solutions to rectify the structural issues surrounding eyewitness testimony

Learning Taxonomy:

Bloom's Revised Levels: Understand, Analyze, Apply, Create

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