How Effective Are Pre-Laboratory Videos?

 

How Effective Are Pre-Laboratory Videos?

 

 

Presentation of Poster at MiCER2020 conference.

The Methods in Chemical Education Research held an online conference last year. My MSc supervisor encouraged me to attend the conference and present a poster to show my work. I was lucky enough to have my poster accepted for a presentation slot. These were held on June 11^th 2020 in Zoom breakout rooms – each poster had its own room for 40 minutes. Conference attendees could switch between breakout room.

My poster was to be presented in session A, breakout room 8.

This was the final version of the poster I presented at the conference after taking in the advice from my supervisor Dr Patrick Thomson.

I had a short spiel, which I could keep returning to as people arrived and left the poster breakout room.

“My name is Vanessa Knipe. I’m an MSc Student reading Forensic Science at the University of Strathclyde.  Due to CoV-19 I am unable to do a regular lab project so I have invented this project to fulfil the thesis requirements of the MSc degree programme. As you can see I’m a mature student, due to a career break to care for my Autistic son it has been 22 years since I last worked in STEM, 30 years since I attended University.

“The project grew out of the startling difference in presentation of the subject matter, in fact I found the degree of ‘interactivity’ that modern students expect from their tutors to be very distracting.  In undergraduate practical laboratory sessions, and working in medical labs, we had been required to follow strict standard operating procedures but the MSc practical required interpretation of the instructions. The university provided pre-laboratory activities to help with the interpretation. I felt that the pre-lab videos were the most helpful of those activities and wondered if the other students shared that feeling. Did this feeling show any correlation with improved grades?

“As laboratory-based projects were not possible in 2020, I was allowed to undertake a statistical analysis of the grades of four years of students taking the course culminating in the cohort of which I was a part. In this time one of the practicals had a pre-lab video removed for what were considered good reason, so I could analyse the data of this practical against two controls, one with a video in all four years and the other with no video for all four years.”

As this was a Method in Chemistry Education Research conference, I took them through my intended methods using the simple flow chart shown below.

“Even when I was at University 30 years ago, I loved mathematic and statistics. When I started on this course they introduced me to Excel, which was nothing like the Excel I used to use. I could calculate the standard deviation of over 2000 results in under 2 minutes. I was charmed.

“I was also given permission by university Ethics committee to run a survey of students in my cohort. After evaluating the various survey platforms, they seemed to have similar functionalities, I chose Qualtrics on the basis that the University of Strathclyde already had an account.  This is intended to give me some numerical values which I can compare against the results of my statistical analysis and some written answers to give me a context in which to interpret my results. The written answers will be analysed using the methods of Thematic Analysis made popular by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clark at the University of Auckland.

“I hope to see whether or not the videos have been effective for the teaching of MSc Students, and also to write a script for a new teaching resource for one of the experiments which has no pre-lab video.”

For the actual day I used an outline version to prevent me just reading from a script instead of presenting the poster.

It runs as follows

• ·         I’m an MSc student in Forensic Science
• ·         Due to CoV-19 I am unable to do a regular lab project so I have invented this project to fulfil the thesis requirements of the MSc degree programme.
• ·         It has been 22 years since I worked in STEM
• ·         30 Years since I last attended University
• ·         The difference in presentation of the subject matter in Lectures was startling.
• ·         I found much of the interactivity parts distracting
• ·         The laboratory part of the course required interpretation rather than following strict SOPs
• ·         I felt the pre-lab videos very helpful with that level of interpretation and wondered if other students had the same feeling
• ·         Did this ‘feeling’ about how helpful the pre-lab show any correlation with improved grades
• ·         As I couldn’t do a laboratory-based project I was allowed to undertake statistical analysis of the effectiveness of the videos as my MSc project
• ·         I hope to see whether or not they are effective and to write a script for an new teaching resource for one of the experiments that had no pre-lab video. 

I used this as a basis to run a circular talk which visitors to my breakout room could drop in and out again at the point where I started repeating.

At the end of each cycle I asked if there were any questions.

Two interesting questions were...

Q1 – I’m having trouble engaging my pupils with pre-lab videos, what have you found that helped.

A1 – I suggested that there was a difference between the traditional video that depicted a demonstrator at the front of the lab and the new style of First Person Perspective (FPP) videos using a Go Pro camera. This might help engage reluctant learners if the video was in FPP.

Q2 – As someone trying to do a project in this time, what was the most difficult part of making up a survey?

A2 – I suggested that my research had shown that nine minutes was the ideal length of time for a survey to take and I had difficulty in compressing my questions to fit that ideal time.

Both appeared happy with their answers.

I had an interesting discussion with another person about the usefulness or otherwise of Likert Scale versus sliders in the Qualtrics Survey platform.