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:

• “What was difficult to understand?...Please write down what you want to pay more attention to when reading the text.” 

Summary of the main findings

I will be focusing on the main findings, but the research article is open access and readers who want to dive more into the topic can do so.

• There was no evidence that participants overestimated their knowledge in the educational video condition compared to the video script condition. Thus, the “illusion of understanding” phenomenon was not found in this experiment.

• The educational video led to more situational interest than reading the video script, but this did not translate into more engagement with the book chapter later on.

• Participants in the educational video condition said they felt less mental effort and perceived the material as easier than participants in the video script condition.

• There was no general benefit of providing prompts on learning performance! Rather: Participants in the educational video condition benefitted from answering prompts compared to not answering prompts, while participants in the video script condition showed the opposite pattern: they performed better without prompts than with prompts. The advantage of prompts in the educational video condition compared to the video script condition was due to the higher quality of prompt answers in the educational video group. Thus, it seemed like watching an educational video set up the learners to provide better answers to prompt questions which increased their performance on the later test. The relative drop in performance for learners in the video script group who received prompts remains a puzzle. Somehow providing prompts after reading a video script and before reading a book chapter seems to harm performance. The researchers did find that learners in the video script/prompt group scored lowest in intrinsic motivation at the end of the experiment.

The key take home message from the presented research is that whether to prompt or not to prompt depends on the specific learning setup, i.e., educational video versus video script as initial learning event. To use the researchers’ words: “…our results imply that the appropriate provision of instructional support such as prompts is often not as simple as it might first appear” (p. 12).

(cover image by Julia M Cameron on Pexels)

Reference

(1) Krebs, M. C., Braschoß, K., & Eitel, A. (2024). Does watching an explainer video help learning with subsequent text? – Only when prompt-questions are provided. Learning and Instruction, 94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2024.101988