Impact of Video-Based Educational Content on Middle School Students’ Earthquake Knowledge and Attitudes

This study aimed to evaluate the impact of video-based educational content developed within the scope of earthquake education on middle school students’ earthquake-related knowledge and attitudes. The study employed a one-group pretest–posttest pre-experimental design and was conducted during the 2024–2025 academic year with 481 students enrolled in public middle schools. The video-based instructional materials were designed to enhance students’ cognitive understanding and affective responses to earthquakes. Data were collected using the Let’s Understand Earthquakes Test and the Attitude Toward Earthquakes Scale. Paired-samples t-tests and one-way ANOVA were used for data analysis. The findings of this study indicated that the intervention did not produce a statistically significant improvement in students’ overall earthquake knowledge, although a significant gain was observed in the protective behaviors dimension. In contrast, students’ attitudes toward earthquakes improved significantly with a large effect size. The results suggest that video-based educational materials developed within the scope of earthquake education are particularly effective in influencing affective outcomes such as attitudes, risk perception, and value-oriented motivation, while being less effective in fostering abstract conceptual knowledge. The study provides design implications for developing more cognitively supportive digital disaster-education materials.