Video Diaries Help Evaluate Student Learning

The UK's University of Gloucestershire has a partnership with Uganda's National Teacher's College, Kaliro, which is located in an isolated, rural area of Uganda. As a component of the partnership, the University of Gloucestershire sends students on annual 17-day field visits to Uganda. To justify the program's expense, risks, and even its environmental impacts, organizers of the field course wanted to evaluate the program's effectiveness, particularly with respect to what the British students learned about sustainability.

The researchers were frustrated that during conversations in the field, “students made deeply personal verbal comments on their learning, the development of their world view and how they felt themselves transformed by their experiences.” But, when asked to complete evaluation forms, “students tended to respond with very mundane comments about the organisation, transport arrangements, food, etc. and did not focus to any great extent on their learning, even when asked directly to do so.”

With the hope of getting more authentic, personal responses that could better gauge the nature of students' learning, the authors offered students the opportunity to record video diaries. They point to previous research that indicates that video diaries can encourage self-reflection and produce particularly rich data that can even surpass the quality of interview data. The medium can also help people with poor writing skills to express their thoughts, and can even allow experienced writers to expound on complex ideas because the format is less structured. The researchers do note, however, that drawbacks to the approach include the facts that researchers cannot ask follow-up questions to further explore ideas, and that, in some ways, video diaries can be “self-conscious performances in front of the camera.”

Students from two field classes (2006 and 2007) were offered the opportunity to record the diaries. Participation was voluntary, and the students could edit the content of the tapes before giving them to the researchers. Although the researchers were most interested in what the students were learning about sustainability and sustainable development, they instead asked students to talk about what they were learning about Uganda, the UK, their subject area, the other field class students, and themselves. The researchers thought that talking about these aspects of the program would come more naturally to students than talking about sustainability, but that their learning about sustainability might be gauged by their responses to these other prompts.

Because of both technical issues and the very close quarters of the groups, only a small number of students completed the task. But, the authors think that “Despite the small number of participants, the video diaries yielded very rich data about the student experience during the field class.” As they reviewed the diaries, the researchers found thoughtful commentary, much of which was related to sustainability. In general, the researchers found females to be less self-conscious than males in making the diaries. Some students made recordings with one or more friends, which seemed to work well for female-female and male-female pairs. “It was markedly unsuccessful for male-male pairs,” though.

As the researchers analyzed the tapes, they uncovered ample evidence of learning related to sustainability, whether or not the students were aware of their own learning or the role of the field program. The authors conclude that the video diary approach was more effective than written evaluation tools. And the authors think it's an approach that others should consider: “That the method worked so well in the highly inconvenient circumstances of rural Africa bodes well for its transferability to a range of other contexts as a tool to investigate learning.”