Assessing Screencasts
April 1st, 2011 by Greg R Notess
I’m not in Philadelphia for ACRL today, but there was an interesting session this afternoon entitled “Do Screencasts Really Work? Assessing Student Learning through Instructional Screencasts.” Even better, ACRL has posted the PowerPoint slides, the paper, and a handout with links and sources. These report on research from the University of Michigan library attempting to answer the question “do undergraduate students really learn from watching these videos?” The study included 15 undergraduate students who were pre-tested, shown two screencasts, and then post-tested on the same tasks (finding a subject-specific library database on the library’s website). The two YouTube-hosted screencasts can be seen at UMich’s site: Why Use Library Databases and Finding Library Databases, and both were created using ScreenFlow (Mac software).
The conclusion? “The results of this study indicate that screencasts facilitate student learning. By viewing instructional screencasts, most students learn how to successfully complete a multi-step research process, such as the series of tasks in this study. Most students are able to transfer their knowledge of the concepts involved in the process and apply it in new scenarios.” While this is a limited study it does show that instructional screencasts can be successful.