Learning from text and video blogs: comprehension effects on secondary school students

Abstract

Informational video blogs are a popular method of communication among students that may be fruitful educational tools, but their potential benefits and risks remain unclear. Streaming videos created by YouTubers are often consumed for entertainment, which may lead students to develop habits that hinder in-depth information processing. We aimed to test this hypothesis by comparing students’ perceived attention to task, metacognitive calibration of their level of comprehension, and comprehension outcomes between reading text blogs and watching video blogs. We also examined the influence of notetaking. 188 lower secondary students read two text blog entries and watched two video blog entries, and completed a series of tasks. Results showed no statistically significant effect of blog format and notetaking on students’ perceived on-task attention, metacognitive calibration, and comprehension of blog entries. Nevertheless, we found a triple interaction effect of format, notetaking, and students’ reading comprehension on blog entry comprehension. Only students low in reading comprehension benefited from notetaking and only when they read the text blog entries. These results indicate that video blogs can be as suitable for learning as text blogs and that notetaking can help struggling readers overcome their difficulties when learning from text blogs but not from video blogs.

Video‐blogs and linguistic simplification for students with intellectual disability

“…Thus, they would apply more efficient regulation strategies to better align the actual difficulty of the information conveyed in videos with the time devoted to studying them. This interpretation and the results of List (2018) would agree with the results of a subsequent study conducted by the research team of Salmer on (Delgado et al, 2021) which revealed that the effect of blog format (video or text) was not significant regarding comprehension accuracy for secondary students (9th and 10th grade).…”

“…Regarding the influence of blog format on comprehension accuracy, we could say that, in light of our results, young adults with intellectual disability benefit equally from learning through text-blog posts and video-blog posts. This result contrasts with the negative effect of video on learning reported by Salmer on et al ( 2020) in children, but they are in line with the absence of a media effect on comprehension reported by List (2018) with undergraduates and by Delgado et al (2021) with secondary students. Thus, we can elucubrate that older students with intellectual disability probably have enough experience with watching videos for learning, which would allow them to develop efficient regulation strategies, as in text reading.…”

“…For those learning materials that resulted too easy or too difficult, some questions were re-formulated to make them similar to the rests of texts. As we needed at least eight different learning materials in order to have two items per experimental condition in our study, we added twomore learning materials from a similar study piloted with a group of secondary school students with typical development (Delgado et al, 2021). On average, simplified texts were classified from 'normal' to 'quite easy' according to the Spanish legibility formula of Muñoz and Muñoz (2006) and had more sentences and paragraphs but fewer words per sentence than the original texts for secondary students which were classified from 'a bit difficult' to 'quite difficult' (for details, see Supporting information S1).…”

Do medium and Context Matter when learning from multiple complementary Digital texts and videos?

“…Many of these videos are focused on educational content that pertains to different disciplines. As noted by Delgado et al (2021), educational video blogs (vblogs) are very popular among young people and constitute a large share of the YouTube videos. Among the characteristics of such videos is interactivity, that is, viewers can pause, re-watch some parts, or advance fast.…”

“…This makes videos comparable to texts where readers can re-read sentences and paragraphs as well as skip parts of the text. The interactivity of the learning material is a relevant characteristic for learning (Delgado et al, 2021); in fact, studies comparing digital texts and interactive videos have shown no medium difference with respect to comprehension (e.g., Burin et al, 2021;Delgado et al, 2021;Salmerón et al, 2020;Tarchi, 2021). For example, no effect of medium on comprehension performance emerged in a recent study that compared digital text, video in the form of audio explanation with written keywords, and video that also added dynamic decorative and irrelevant images as seductive details to the previous type (Burin et al, 2021).…”