Case study: Video feedback for students in Psychology

Department of Psychology
Sally Quinn

Sally Quinn outlines her use of video for feedback to her project students. After providing written feedback comments on three sections of project drafts, Sally brings the work up on screen and records further elaboration on key aspects. These recordings vary in focus and length depending on individual needs but the videos are usually a maximum of 10-15 minutes in length. She then makes the written comments and the recordings available to students via a private folder in google drive in advance of a feedback meeting. Sally says she believes that the time needed to create the feedback recordings has a direct pay-off in increased student engagement with the feedback and increased efficiency of face-to-face feedback meetings. She found that students were more likely to come to these meetings fully prepared, the quality of discussion improved and the need for further clarification afterwards was reduced. Students appreciated the further elaboration on key comments and valued having a permanent record of both the written and the verbal comments to draw on both immediately for the meeting and later when further developing their project work.

Sally is clear that, for her, this process is particularly well-suited for the relatively intensive, individualised approaches required for project work. For larger, more generic modules, she describes how ‘how-to videos’ are embedded within written feedback forms to provide students with a ‘just in time’ resource for addressing common issues in academic writing within Psychology. These include exemplars aiming to contextualise the guidance. Qualitative feedback from students suggests that this process is a highly-valued supplement to written feedback.

Watch their presentation:

Video feedback for students in Psychology (Panopto viewer) (13 mins 23 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Okay so the thing I'm going to talk about today...I'm going to talk about two different ways in which we give feedback to students through audio and video feedback. The first one is to our project students and this is actually what I do with my project students is not something we do generally across the department, but what they do have generally is that they get feedback on a draft project.

So there's four sections in psychology, there's four sections of their final year dissertation project. They can hand in the first three as a draft and get feedback on those three sections. They submit this during summer of week one and then in week two we have a one-to-one meeting with our students and go through this feedback with them which they then have to go off and act upon. So that's kind of like the standard structure for our department but the problems that I came to kind of came across, and I was thinking this while I was seeing my students in the first year of doing this, was that this meeting literally became me going "this is all your feedback" for your draft and they were kind of just sat there, some of them with quite kind of puzzled looks on their faces, feeling quite overwhelmed with all this feedback I was giving to them in one huge go...and often they would be emailing me afterwards saying I can't really remember what you said about this section can you kind of reiterate what you said, and then afterwards our meeting they'd often come up with questions once they've had time to digest that feedback as well. So I thought actually this system probably isn't the best way for students to get their feedback to be able to digest it and then think about what it is that they're going to be doing to improve their work.

So what I actually do now with my own students is that I mark their drafts and give them written feedback on a word document and then I record a series of videos that go through some of the comments; so some of them are quite self explanatory but those are the comments that I feel I need to kind of expand on and talk through reasons why I've kind of made that comment. And what I do then is they have their draft with the comments on plus the videos for each section in a Google folder and then I share that with them a week before our meeting. So they get a week to look through and listen to the recordings and to kind of digest the feedback that I've given them.

So this is just an example of one folder so you can see they've got a video for each of the introduction method and results and then the draft is is there with the comments on them. The length of these videos can differ depending on how much they need feedback. So sometimes for some people because the method sections are quite short so with some of them the the video is literally one minute long because there's not really much for them to improve on. But other ones especially for the introduction is which is quite a big part of their project because it's a review of the literature, that can be up to ten to fifteen minutes long sometimes depending on what the issues are with that piece of work. So that's what I do with the students there.

Now the benefits of this, I've done this for probably the last three years now, it's first year students have time to digest that feedback, and they can do it in small chunks if they want to. So if they feel a bit overwhelmed just sitting down and doing all of it all in one go, they can kind of split it up in their own time as and when they feel ready to do this. And I think many of these benefits kind of fit with this accessibility thing that we're all kind of trying to live up to now because you know students who maybe have language difficulties or kind of reading and writing disabilities or even know things like anxiety depression it can affect the way that they concentrate etc, so it's easy for them to kind of manage how much feedback they do in any one sitting.

It also gives them a permanent record of both the written and the verbal feedback, so before in our meeting they didn't have anything other than their memory or the notes that they made to take away with them whereas now they've got me talking to them, through a video, explaining these things. They can always go back if they forgot forgotten what I said. And as I said before it kind of allows some time to digest this feedback and then think about the questions that they then want to ask me, so it kind of gets rid of that emailing after our session with all these questions that have suddenly come into their minds after digesting the feedback.

It also allows some time to think about questions that I've raised on their feedback, so I might ask them to kind of think about why they've phrased something in a certain way or why they've used certain evidence to support a point. So rather than me kind of foxing them in the meeting and going "so why did you use this one" and then kind of being a bit blindsided by it. They have time to think about that and they come up with a you know proper and of answer.

So what I found from this is then the face-to-face meetings that we do have are actually much more productive because they have really good questions that they're asking me. We can talk about things because we both already know the feedback and, quite nicely, the meetings end up being a lot shorter than they were with the old system.

So the only thing with this system I use...so I usually have around 9 to 11 project students, so it just takes slightly longer for me to do the feedback because I'm recording those videos but, as I say, there's all those benefits of that meeting being shorter so it's kind of you know give-and-take. And if you've got any kind of quite large groups of students it's difficult to do; it's gonna take you a long time if you've got you know 20 plus students, it's going to take you a long time to do that.

So I'm just gonna talk about something else that we do for our larger cohorts, which is a series of how-to videos. So these came about because our undergraduate year 1 and 2, so we've got about two hundred - two hundred and twenty students in our cohorts for year one and year two and their work is usually marked by GTA's and they get you know this kind of standard feedback form given to them on their work when they pick it up after it's been marked. And what I was finding was a lot of students were finding it hard to interpret the feedback they were given especially the bits that were telling them this is where you need to improve because they didn't really know how to do that, so they knew they needed to work on say for example critical writing but they didn't really know how to go and do that.

So I thought what would be quite useful is for our students to have these really short snappy videos, across a range of topics to do with writing, that would tell them how to do these things and give them examples of how to do that. So we have a VLE site, which has being developed over the last year or so, called academic skills psychology and in that we've got a page just dedicated to these videos. And you'll see we've got videos relating to essay and practical report writing and then ones that are just relevant to essays and ones are just relevant practical reports.

So what happens with the feedback then? So this is an example of the feedback table that students get on their work, it gets broken down into the marking criteria and then in the last section, this is the feed-forward section where we tell them these are the main two things that you should be concentrating on for your next piece of work, and then links to these videos are now put into that. So, as you can see here, the marker has suggested that they watch videos on how to write with clarity, how to use evidence to make a point and on how to critically analyze an academic paper. So these videos are quite useful for the students because it's kind of showing them how to go and do these things, and the feedback that we had was that they liked the different quality of examples that we use in these videos. So a lot of these videos will kind of talk them through 'this is how you do it' here's an example that isn't very good, here's one that's slightly better but it's still got room for improvement, and here's one that's kind of like an exemplar of what you should be doing.

And the students that I had focus groups with; they liked that the work did this because they can kind of identify where their work was within those three examples and see how they could kind of get to that next level. A lot of them said that they found it much easier to watch those videos and just to go off read a webpage on how to do stuff because it's nicer when somebody's talking you through things, and quite a lot of the students in the focus group; they're kind of like "it was just like a light-bulb moment that's why I did it for my next one I got 10 more marks it was amazing you know" they were so really positive about these videos and especially the international students; we had a few masters students who were international students and they both said that the videos that they watched really helped them with the style of writing that we have here because it was slightly different to where they've done their undergraduate degree. So they found them really useful as well so I think it kind of speaks to a broad range of students because it kind of taps into quite a lot of things about how to kind of excel in writing. And that's kind of what we do so I'm happy to take questions.

I've got four questions on Menti so I'll do that.

So how many students do you have to do this for? What would be the maximum number of students you could use this method? I presume that was a question about the first set of videos. As I said I do it for about ten students each year. I think if you're going up to kind of 20 it's going to be really difficult to manage time-wise but there's other things that you could do such as these videos I've just talked about now.

How personalized/generic is the video feedback how many videos would you need to record? Is that about the first set of videos or the second - Okay so first set. So that they're specific to a student so if I just show you, for example in this student from last year. So this video here has her piece of work in it and I talked her through the comments for each; you know if there's a comment that I want to expand on I'll pick up on it and she sees where it is and I might kind of say "okay so when you're talking earlier about this in this bit here this is where you need to refer back to it blah blah blah" that kind of stuff. So it's very personal to their piece of work and it's just for them to listen to yeah.

Okay next question. Has it improved the quality of work produced by students. I presume again that was for the first set of videos rather than the second? Yeah , I don't think it's necessarily improved their work massively, if I compare it to when I didn't do that, but I think it's improved the way that they kind of don't constantly email me afterwards with questions which is a time-saver for me, and I think it's better for them because it's a it's easier to talk them through things and to explain it on email. Some of them do a better job, some of them don't, but it's just that variability and students I think it doesn't really alter that variability at all.

Okay so a nice comment "great idea to have a store of videos you can link the student feedback", what do you use to create your videos? I use Camtasia because as part of the how-to videos project we've got some money from Rapid Response Fund and part of that was to purchase and Camtasia licenses but you can use the Panopto system just as easily and I guess you guys have got instructions on how to use that for this kind of thing, kind of screen capture? (assent from audience) So the how-to videos, the last set of videos, those assessments are submitted through the VLE but they're not marked on the VLE. They're marked online by our GTA's but they're marked as kind of a away from the VLE. Just as Word docs. Yeah, I think students are a bit calmer, particular the first set that I was talking about. They do get quite anxious about this piece of work because there's a big piece of work and it's a final kind of project of the units and it counts for a lot in that year. So they do panic about it a bit and I think giving them something concrete that they can keep going back to, to listen to that feedback, kind of gives them that safety blanket they like where they're not worrying about whether they've written down what I said correctly or not, or whether they've interpreted it in the wrong way etc, so I think it's it kind of calms them down a little bit yeah definitely.

They only get one set of feedback on a draft but they get it for three sections in that draft, they get a video per section. Well I the reason I did it in three different videos is because it can be get quite long. If they were just working on the results section for example, I didn't want them to have to go to the back to like one big video and try and find the bit that where the results section started they could just leap into that and go straight for it. So I thought that would just be more useful for the students really, I mean you could just do it all in one if you wanted to.