Faculty Spotlight:
Using Screencast Explanations to Enhance Student Learning and Assessment
Tracy Gardner
Teaching Professor, Chemical and Biological Engineering
This resource, created in collaboration with Mines Professor Tracy Gardner, offers an overview of screencast explanations, which can be used to foster metacognition, promote critical-thinking, and facilitate iterative learning through feedback and revisions.
What Are Screencast Explanations?
I first developed the idea for screencast explanations while teaching an online course. Folks are often skeptical of online assessments, fearing that students will cheat and circumvent their learning process. I wanted to have a way of assessing the students’ real understanding of the work they had done while minimizing the possibility and efficacy of cheating. I decided to invite students to record themselves explaining their solutions to exam problems in my online course. To give them practice at doing that before exams, I also asked them to explain solutions to homework problems for each assignment. Some students appreciated the opportunity to record themselves explaining things, saying it helped them learn the material better through reflection and iteration. It also helped me better identify student misconceptions—how they sometimes got “correct” answers with incorrect reasoning (which helped me improve how I write assessments), and different ways of thinking about or explaining course concepts. This allowed me to give individualized and more helpful feedback, and adjust my teaching to better support their learning. I now incorporate screencast explanations into all of my courses, including Fluid Mechanics, Heat and Mass Transfer, Material and Energy Balances, and Reaction Engineering.
Screencasts are video files simultaneously recording what’s on the computer screen and the author’s voice (and optionally, also their face). Screencast Explanations are screencasts students make of themselves explaining their work/thinking on assignments such as homework, take-home exams, exam corrections, portfolios, discussion posts, etc.
How Does It Work?
1. Students do the assignment in whatever format is appropriate.
I’ve reviewed Screencast Explanations of handwritten work (on paper or a tablet), work done in Excel, PowerPoint, Matlab, ASPEN, and a combination of these media.
2. Students upload their work to the computer.
For handwritten work, it should be scanned and uploaded to the computer. Most other formats will already be available on the computer. If multiple formats are used, they should have them all open and accessible on the computer.
3. Students make a screencast of themselves clicking and talking through their work, explaining their process (assumptions, struggles, sources, justifications, approaches, etc.)
I set time limits on the length of their screencasts based on the assignment; for example, up to 30 seconds to explain a single homework problem, up to 2 minutes to explain a corrected exam problem, and up to 10-15 minutes to explain a course project or portfolio. The time limit forces students to learn the material well enough to present it clearly, completely, and concisely.
4. Students store the video file to a shareable location such as YouTube, Canvas, MediaSpace, or Google Drive.
Students need to ensure their video will be open to the intended audience (TA, instructor, or peers if doing peer reviews). Then they insert a clickable link to the video file at the top of their work and submit it. I typically have the work submitted as a single .PDF with the clickable link at the top, though additional files could also be submitted. If done well, the PDF (and other files) may not need to be reviewed in detail when grading, as the key results, methods, and other aspects of the submitted work should be highlighted in the screencast.
5. The Instructor reviews the screencast and provides grades and/or feedback.
I tend to watch the screencasts in double time, pausing to note important things so rich, targeted feedback can be supplied and scores are justified. They earn scores based on the work as well as their ability to correctly explain it. The weighting of the grade (in terms of balancing the written work and explanations) can vary by assignment. Alternatively recorded explanations could serve as an “on/off” switch—if the student explanation indicates the work is not their own, maybe they don’t get any credit.
What Are the Benefits?
Promotes Student metacognition and Critical Thinking
Because screencast explanations ask students to engage in constructive learning (Chi 2009) through explaining their process, identifying their assumptions, and justifying their decisions, they help promote deep, higher-order and reflective thinking (Tanner 2012).
Increases Authenticity of Assessments
Rather than merely solving a problem and submitting it, students are using screencast explanations to communicate their thinking to various audiences in various formats—much like they might in their future careers. When paired with the task of developing their own questions (see IQE assignments below,) students are engaging in sociotechnical thinking by providing social, authentic context to course material.
Accurately Assesses Higher-Order Learning
By making student’s critical thinking and reasoning “visible,” screencast explanations allow me to accurately assess students’ levels of achievement of higher-order course learning outcomes. I am also more able to identify and address common misconceptions, which me adjust and provide feedback that is both individualized and common among our student community.
Increases Grading Efficiency and Efficacy
I have found that screencast explanations significantly reduce the amount of time it takes me to grade student work. While assessing student projects used to take me about 30 minutes per project, I am now able to spend about 10-15 minutes per project while also providing more meaningful, consistent feedback on student work.
How Can I Use Screencast Explanations?
Click below to explore a few of the ways I use Screencast Explanations in my courses. There are certainly many more applications of this activity, but these should help you get started.
EXAM Corrections
PEER REVIEWS
Portfolios
IQE Assignments
EXAM CORRECTIONS
How it works
After completing exams, students have the opportunity to earn additional points on their exams by reviewing their work, figuring out what was done incorrectly or incompletely, and “trying again.” While I used to facilitate these re-tries by writing new test problems that assessed the same concepts and skills, I now invite students to review and revise their original submissions. Students can earn half the points they missed on an exam problem by redoing the original exam problem correctly and making a screencast explaining their original mistakes and omissions along with the new corrected solution. I started doing this to reward growth and the process of learning from mistakes.
ASSESSING EXAM Corrections
I return exams with scores for each question but without detailed feedback regarding what was right or wrong at this point. I then offer an “optional exam corrections opportunity” assignment, which students can choose to do none, any parts of, or all of. As part of their screencast explanation, students are asked to explain their original error as well detail their process for correcting their mistake. For each problem or problem part they get 100% correct on the corrections assignment, they get half the points they missed on that problem/part added to their original exam score.
Benefits
Providing students with opportunities to correct their mistakes and “try again” lowers test anxiety (see my colleague Becky Swanson’s work), increases motivation, promotes a “growth mindset” (Dweck 2006) and provides a more authentic assessment experience than one-off exams. I also ensure that this assignment is accessible by giving students choice in the process—whether they want to complete the exam corrections or not—and, in the case of screencast corrections, allowing them to record their corrections on their own time. Viewing screencast explanations of exam corrections helps me hear the students’ thinking and assess their understanding, while saving me time because I do not need to write new exam problems or schedule another time for re-assessment. Lastly, it circumvents the problem of cheating by allowing students to work together and use whatever resources availble to them (as they will in their future careers), while also being accountable for explaining their corrections step by step. Note: Faculty should write new exams every year anyway, but particularly with the second method here since at least some students will certainly have access to past years’ exam problems, and possibly also recorded solutions. That said, providing old exams and corrections (with permission) can help students visualize what is expected of them.
PEER REVIEWS
HOW IT WORKS
Students watch the screencast explanations of other students’ work and then provide positive and constructive comments to the student. I do this through Canvas by enabling peer reviews. You can choose how many peer reviews each submission gets (I use two), whether the peer reviews are anonymous or not (I do not make mine anonymous for accountability and cooperability so students can contact each other for clarifications, for example), and when they get assigned (I have them assigned 30 minutes after the assignment is due, to give a grace window for slightly late submissions).
BENEFITS
With screencast peer reviews, students engage in collaborative learning by seeing other students’ work, hearing their explanations, and engaging in dialogue through supportive peer feedback. This helps to cultivate a sense of “joint intellectual effort,” a mutual “searching for understanding, solutions, or meanings” among our students (Smith & Macgregor 1992). More than this, they learn how to give, respond to, and evaluate quality feedback as they revisit and iterate on their own work. Screencast peer reviews also reduce the amount of time I spend grading.
Assessing Peer Reviews
Students peer review each other’s work and are assessed on the quantity and quality of the feedback they provide. They are instructed to give at least one positive and one constructive comment, both of which need to have “substance”— that is, be specific to the work presented and actionable by the author of the work. To train students how to give and respond to good feedback, I 1) provide them with example submissions with mocked up feedback and responses to the feedback, and 2) train graders or grade myself the first few assignments, modeling the specific and actionable feedback to each submission using a rubric. The time it takes to do this gets replaced after the first couple submissions by reviewing and scoring their feedback instead.
It is important to tell students upfront and often that the feedback they receive may not be correct—this mirrors the “real world.” The responsibility falls on them to assess the feedback they receive and decide whether they think it is correct or not. For peer-reviewed projects there is often an additional step of responding to the feedback they receive either by changing their work for a later submission or opting not to change it, either way justifying and explaining their “response” to the feedback.
PORTFOLIOS
HOW IT WORKS
Portfolios are collections of student work demonstrating evidence of meeting all of the course learning outcomes (CLOs) for a given course. I have had two types of Portfolio projects in my courses:
- Collections of IQE’s including responses to feedback.
- Collection of all kinds of work including assignments, quizzes, physical and virtual labs, notes, etc. mapped by the student to each specific CLO.
For both types, student submit a collection of documents including a screencast of them walking through and explaining the work.
BENEFITS
Screencast portfolios help me offer a variety of summative assessment opportunities as opposed to exams only. Because they act as evidence of student learning throughout the term, they also help students see how all of the things they do in a course relate to the course learning outcomes, and to provide them with an opportunity to self-assess and reflect on their work in the course in the hopes of increasing retention of knowledge. I have not yet tried this, but in the future I would like to include a final screencast reflection where students can explain a struggle they overcame, something they are particularly proud of, the logic behind what they included in their portfolio, and a justification for how their portfolio demonstrates their achievement of course learning outcomes.
Assessing Portfolios
When collecting IQEs and responses to feedback as part of a portfolio, I typically use intermediate submissions rather than one final submission at the end of the term. This allows me to provide intermediate feedback and adjustment if students are not adequately or accurately self-assessing their work. In this case, the Portfolio comprised three “turn-ins;” one for each of the three modules in the course. Each turn-in consisted of:
- The original IQE’s submitted for that module
- The feedback the student received on the IQE’s
- Changes made based on the feedback and/or self re-assessment, along with explanations of how the changes made the IQE’s better and/or justifications for why changes were not made in spite of constructive feedback.
Students were graded on the quality of their work, explanations, the feedback they gave others, and their responses to the feedback from others. These skills (giving and responding to positive and constructive feedback) were added as course learning outcomes since they were also part of the assessment.
For more open-ended screencast portfolios that include various types of work, I use my CLOs to structure the assignment. Students review and map their work throughout the course on all labs, assignments, quizzes, readings, in-class activities, and so forth to the specific CLOs and assess the level to which they think they have demonstrated meeting that specific CLO. They then create a presentation in whatever format they want (some use PowerPoint and others do not) and make a screencast of themselves presenting the work one specific CLO at a time, providing their self-assessment and justification thereof.
IQE Assignments
How it works
“IQE”s are assignments in which students write their own concept question and calculation problem based on the week’s topic(s). It stands for ‘Individual Questions and Explanations.” The idea is for students to be able to connect the material with something of interest to them—something they’ve often wondered about, something related to a hobby of theirs, or something one of the homework problems made them think of as an extension.
Students write up their questions and solutions, record a screencast of themselves explaining their step-by-step thinking and and problem solving, and upload a clickable link (along with a .pdf of their problems and solutions). Typically for longer calculation problems they are to write them up using the KFAPS (Known, Find, Assume, Properties, Solution) approach. Screencast length is limited, typically to 1-2 minutes per problem, though they can go a bit longer if the problems are complex.
ASSESSING IQEs
I have used IQEs either in place of or in addition to homeworks, so they are submitted “weekly” for a normal 15-week 3 credit course broken up into weekly chunks of material. Each question and solution is “scored” on a rubric for clarity, reasonableness, complexity/completeness, originality/creativity, and focus of presentation. I have sometimes made them mandatory, in that they were part of the course score for everyone, and sometimes made them optional, in which case scores for them could be replaced by summative assessment (exam, in that case) scores. More recently, I have not “scored” them at all, meaning they count for 0% of the course score—though the rubric was still used to provide feedback—and instead let students use them as feeders to a Portfolio, which could lessen the weight on exams in the course. In this case, students have the opportunity to modify (or not, and justify why not) their IQE’s based on feedback and submit a “set” of them as a Portfolio.
Benefits
Students get excited and feel a sense of agency, spending more time on research and question-writing. They engage in high-order thinking tasks, such as degrees of freedom analysis, verifying data, justifying assumptions, and assessing reasonableness without a definitive answer. A few examples include:
- Investigating why the top of a can of beans heats faster than the bottom.
- Myth-busting, like whether dimpling a car improves gas mileage.
- Applying concepts to hobbies, such as designing a greenhouse with heat transfer equations.
Students also learn metacognitive and communication skills through giving and responding to feedback. I have also found that inviting students to bring their interests into the class builds community and increases empathy for me as they see firsthand the challenges of writing good exam questions.
If you would like to implement screencast explanations into your course but need additional support, please feel free to reach out to Tracy Gardner at tgardner@mines.edu, or schedule a consultation with a faculty developer at the Trefny Center.