My research focus and problem statement are centered on students' ability to deeply analyze video and use video as a resource for research. This comes out of a greater driving question about increasing students’ levels of digital literacy. This area of emphasis has had me thinking a lot lately about how much students really pay attention to video content when it is presented in class. As teachers we like to think that we use video to help enhance our students' learning experience and engage those visual learners but is it really working? Is their learning really enhanced? Are they really supplementing their knowledge with the video content and later using that supplemental knowledge to assist them in demonstrating their understanding? Before setting off on an in-depth lesson plan facilitating the students through the use of video as a resource, I thought I would casually test it out.
We were planning an upcoming writing activity based on content the students had read and analyzed, and were already planning to show a video featuring a different story on the same topic to supplement their learning. I thought I would use this activity to get a baseline understanding of how many students, on their own and without teacher involvement, would use the video content presented in class to supplement the content of the writing assignment. I chose one class from which to gather data. My hunch was not many would do it. And the results supported my hunch. Out of 21 students, 7 used the video content to supplement their writing. Out of those 7, only 4 referenced the content correctly, the other 3 actually confused the content between the video and the reading. (They assigned features from the character in the reading to the character in the video and vice versa.) So all told, 4 out of 21 students used the additional source that had been presented to them to supplement their work on the assessment. That’s 19% for those among us with an interest in statistics. Not a very large percentage of students, especially when extrapolated out to all of our classes. To refer to the title of this blog post, I didn't build it and they didn't come.
So if I build it, will they come? Armed with this baseline, I will begin the facilitated lesson plan taking my students through the use of video as a source. In the way that they have learned to evaluate print sources for strength of argument, relevance, validity and bias I will attempt to help them achieve the same with video sources. My hope is this will open up a whole new world of resources for them when they research and write. I wonder if a secondary result will be their ability to better process and use supplemental video content presented in class, and in turn, going back to the driving question, increase their levels of digital literacy. We’ll see!
We were planning an upcoming writing activity based on content the students had read and analyzed, and were already planning to show a video featuring a different story on the same topic to supplement their learning. I thought I would use this activity to get a baseline understanding of how many students, on their own and without teacher involvement, would use the video content presented in class to supplement the content of the writing assignment. I chose one class from which to gather data. My hunch was not many would do it. And the results supported my hunch. Out of 21 students, 7 used the video content to supplement their writing. Out of those 7, only 4 referenced the content correctly, the other 3 actually confused the content between the video and the reading. (They assigned features from the character in the reading to the character in the video and vice versa.) So all told, 4 out of 21 students used the additional source that had been presented to them to supplement their work on the assessment. That’s 19% for those among us with an interest in statistics. Not a very large percentage of students, especially when extrapolated out to all of our classes. To refer to the title of this blog post, I didn't build it and they didn't come.
So if I build it, will they come? Armed with this baseline, I will begin the facilitated lesson plan taking my students through the use of video as a source. In the way that they have learned to evaluate print sources for strength of argument, relevance, validity and bias I will attempt to help them achieve the same with video sources. My hope is this will open up a whole new world of resources for them when they research and write. I wonder if a secondary result will be their ability to better process and use supplemental video content presented in class, and in turn, going back to the driving question, increase their levels of digital literacy. We’ll see!