NSF Award
2314955
This project aims to serve the national interest by identifying ways to improve the quality of chemistry educational videos that students are accessing with increasing frequency on platforms such as YouTube. This individual control of learning allows students to find the right video to meet their needs at any time of day. However, the huge number of videos and greatly varying instructional quality means that students (and instructors!) need help narrowing down this increasingly large volume of content to identify the most effective videos for supporting student learning. The recent shift to remote instruction necessitated by COVID made the quantity of videos even more unmanageable. This project aims to identify elements of instructional videos that are most important for supporting students’ learning of chemistry concepts and evaluate the extent to which the most frequently watched chemistry instructional videos incorporate those elements. This project will contribute to the advancement of knowledge by identifying strengths and weaknesses of the most frequently viewed chemistry instructional videos and indicate core introductory chemistry concepts for which there is a need for more high-quality instructional videos. The video evaluation framework developed as part of this project will serve as a resource both for evaluating videos and for developing a set of guidelines that can be used for developing high quality videos in the future. <br/><br/>The goal of this project is to develop and test an evidence-based framework for evaluating the instructional quality of the most frequently watched chemistry concept videos on YouTube. The educational, cognitive psychology, and chemistry education literature have identified many important criteria for supporting student conceptual understanding in chemistry. Instruction should connect the levels of chemistry instruction (macroscopic, particulate, and symbolic), include three-dimensional learning and causal mechanistic reasoning, and actively engage students in the learning process. Effective instructional videos should employ Mayer’s twelve multimedia principles based on the dual-channel assumption, the limited-capacity assumption, and the active-processing assumption, to engage students in learning. The framework based on these ideas will be refined and tested with videos covering multiple core general chemistry concepts such as Le Chatelier’s Principle, bonding, intermolecular forces, and kinetic molecular theory of gases. For each core chemistry concept investigated, specific expectations will be developed to identify how a video would meet each criterion. Videos for analysis will be identified by conducting searches with a variety of search terms and filtering the videos using the following guidelines: (1) videos for educational purposes; (2) 15 min or less; (3) in English; and (4) over 100,000 views. Selected videos will be independently coded by multiple researchers using the developed framework to establish interrater reliability. Data from the analyses will be used to answer the following research questions: <br/>1. How well do the most watched chemistry videos for core introductory chemistry concepts incorporate features that support conceptual understanding?<br/>2. How well do the most watched chemistry videos for core introductory chemistry concepts incorporate the features of quality instructional videos?<br/>3. What quality criteria are most frequently incorporated into or missing from the most highly viewed videos?<br/>4. How frequently are videos that meet most/all the criteria for high-quality instruction viewed? <br/>A robust evaluation framework combined with identification of commonly lacking features, content area gaps, and engaging video features will allow the project to provide clear recommendations for the development of high-quality chemistry education videos that are attractive to students and support conceptual learning in chemistry. Although this project focuses on conceptual introductory chemistry videos, the aim is for the evaluation framework to be suitable for use with minor modifications in other chemistry subdisciplines (e.g., organic chemistry) or other science disciplines (geology, biology, physics). The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
