Adding captions to educational videos can improve students' comprehension and test scores, found San Francisco State University researchers.
Getting a student to comprehend what is being taught to them is half the work done as far as educating children goes. Sometimes, however, it may be difficult for children to understand stuff. Catering to this need, many schools have opted for videos to teach their students. Though this teaching method has proved to be effective to a certain extent, researchers from San Francisco State University found that there is another way to enhance the effectiveness of educational videos.
Through a new study, researchers found that adding captions to educational videos can dramatically improve students' comprehension and test scores. In the first year of the study, students were shown videos without captions so that Robert Keith Collins, an assistant professor of American Indian studies and his colleagues could establish a baseline of student comprehension. Once this was done, captions were turned on in the videos and researchers observed a significant improvement in comprehension scores in the second year of the study.
"Not only were students talking about how much having the captions helped them as they took notes, their test scores went up," Collins said. "During the baseline year, there were a lot of Cs. In the second years, they went from Cs, Ds and Fs to As, Bs and Cs. It was really significant improvement."
This improvement was not restricted to comprehension test scores. Classroom discussions also became livelier and more interesting as students were able to remember and recall minute details like names of places and people that were in the videos shown to them.
"We're living in an age where our students are so distracted by technology that they sometimes forget where they should focus their attention when engaged with technology or media," he said. "Turning on captions seems to enable students to focus on specific information."
Educational videos are generally used as a learning method for students with disabilities. According to Collins, results from this study reveal that educational videos can be used to teach all students.
