By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel
Educational videos are often used in the classroom setting to support instruction of content. On the positive side, these videos can help scaffolding a topic which can lead to better understanding of it. They can also increase situational interest in students because they are fun which may spark further engagement with the topic. Potential pitfalls of educational videos are that students may overestimate their comprehension of the topic because these videos are often easier to process – leading to a so-called “illusion of understanding”. This can be problematic because students may conclude that no further studying or engaging with further reading is necessary.
In a recent study, Krebs et al. (1) investigated whether adding prompt questions after watching an educational video and before engaging in further reading could be a way to counteract the potential pitfalls and to fully reap the benefits of educational videos. Prompt questions can support learning through knowledge consolidation as it is a form of retrieval practice, but they can also make students aware of their knowledge gaps, and as a consequence, guide future studying efforts.
Krebs et al. (1) had participants either watch a 5-min educational video on test anxiety (educational video condition) or read an 800-word video script on the topic (video script condition). Afterwards, participants either answered 6 prompt questions (prompt condition) or no prompts at all (no-prompt condition). Hence, there were a total of four conditions: a) video/prompt; b) script/prompt; c) video/no-prompt; d) script/no-prompt. Afterwards, all participants were given a 10-page book chapter on test anxiety to study. The text contained some overlapping content with the video/script, but also featured more in-depth content. Finally, recall and transfer performances on the material were assessed through a series of test questions (i.e., multiple choice, open-ended questions, and cloze questions). The researchers also measured a range of variables as part of this experiment such as situational interest, perceived cognitive effort, perceived difficulty of content, and more.
Before looking at the results, I’d like to give a brief overview of the prompts that were used. We will later see that the benefits of the prompts may depend on other conditions, but nevertheless it can be useful to look at a concrete example. Two types of prompts were used: cognitive and metacognitive prompt questions.
Cognitive prompts:
“How do you define performance anxiety, what are its components and how do they affect learners?”
“What are possible causes of severe test anxiety?”
“How can learners, parents and teachers counteract test anxiety?”
“Think of your own example of the most important content of the topic.”
Metacognitive prompt: