Instructional Objectives

Conceptual Understanding ¦ Language Development ¦ Teaching Tool

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Because it helps students create a multimedia product that can be used beyond the classroom, captioning can provide experiences that are inherently engaging and highly motivating. Captioning provides a challenging venue for students to express themselves and to demonstrate their understanding of difficult concepts. Additionally, the end product itself can be a useful teaching tool. A more detailed discussion of each of these ways that captioning addresses multiple instructional objectives follows.

Using Captioning for Conceptual Understanding

Scientific Concepts

Captioning provides the opportunity for a teacher to assess what her/his students are seeing and understanding by providing a window into students' cognition. It allows for more careful determinations regarding the match between what the teacher intended to teach, what the teacher thought the students had observed and what the students actually understood and learned. As one teacher explains,

For students who have language barriers, these dialogues are more cumbersome and captioning serves as a means for teachers to better understand what their students are experiencing.

Science experiments are dynamic occurrences. Actions and reactions often happen quickly, sometimes faster than the eye can discern. One experienced science teacher explicates,

For students with special needs, especially deaf or hard of hearing, as well as those students learning English as a second language (ESL), both the creation of captions and subsequently reading them provides necessary opportunities for mastery of new concepts. Audition is a temporal-based means for communicating. Thus, having words and sentences written down and viewed in conjunction with auditory reinforcement allows for significant support to the learning process. By videotaping and captioning, the observer is able to focus on the essential aspects of that experiment and display his/her understanding by creating captions that also utilize new or less familiar terminology. This serves to reinforce the understanding of the scientific phenomenon at hand and is a means to check if that which was learned is accurate and complete.

Scientific Vocabulary

By using scientific vocabulary in captions, students are reinforcing their knowledge of terminology which often is unique, possibly remote to students' experience, and seldom encountered in their everyday reading. Captioning science experiments demands that students use precise terminology with care and accuracy so as to convey the appropriate and correct information to all viewers.

Accountability

Videotaping and captioning forces students to be more precise in planning experiments and focuses their attention on specific procedures and results. One teacher reports,

Another teacher felt that it made his students "more organized, more methodical and more careful" because they assumed responsibility for teaching the concept to the viewer. He elaborates on this point by saying:

Interestingly, this teacher also noted that these kinds of projects demand precision and accountability on the teacher's part as well, because students are modeling their videotaped experiments after the teacher's demonstration. Teachers have to pay attention to their use of key vocabulary and to present the steps of the experiment methodically and explicitly so that students can carry out their experiments with precision.

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Using Captioning for Language Development

Expression

Captions provide opportunities to express thoughts, ideas and newly learned concepts. The act of writing a word or concept supports students' comprehension and accurate usage of the English language. It is this immediacy of associating words with specific objects, actions, events, places, etc., that makes captioning such a powerful learning tool.

Student who are deaf, due to the nature of their disability, often receive inaccurate or ambiguous auditory information upon which much of their early learning is based. Through the act of captioning, not only are they reading or learning to read, but also they are recoding the information they received through their impaired auditory system to fit more accurately into their knowledge base. They form a new association between what they hear with what is written. Captions, unlike sound, are visible, remaining in view for a significant period of time; thus, a learner can "hold onto" captions because they have more permanency.

Writing captions can also serve as practice using descriptive language. This practice can range from describing what happens in a science experiment to describing things seen in a museum visited on a school fieldtrip.

Translation

For students who use American Sign Language (ASL) the captioning process can serve as a valuable tool in learning to translate ASL into written English. Because the structure and syntax of ASL differs from that of written English, the act of captioning can provide an opportunity for students to translate between ASL and English. This is a difficult but necessary literacy task for many students; as one teacher explains,

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Using Captioning as a Teaching Tool

Review and Reteaching

Captioned videotapes of class activities can be used for review or can provide a means for students catch up on material missed while they were out of school. The act of captioning itself serves as an iterative review of the material; as one teacher remarks,

One benefit of this unique opportunity to replay and review a classroom activity is that it provides a means for students to self-correct in instances in which they made an error in the experiment. One teacher noticed that a group of students had mistakenly reversed the concepts of solar and lunar eclipses and that by reviewing the captions on their tape, realized that they had made an error and were able to self-correct. Another teacher observes that:

Alternative Assessment

Student-created captioned videotapes are an alternative way to assess students' understanding of content-area concepts using performance-based rubrics. Captioning can incorporate students' creativity rather than relying solely on written language skills to convey conceptual understanding. As one teacher remarks,

Accessibility

Student plays, assemblies, sporting events and special fieldtrips can be videotaped and captioned so as to make the event accessible to all. Plays that are scripted can be captioned in advance and then viewed by the audience on a large screen or monitor.

To summarize, there are numerous teaching and learning objectives that can be met using student-created captioned videotapes. Although there are curricular and classroom management challenges associated with the integration of technology into the classroom, teachers who have used captioning report that benefits far outweigh the challenges. When asked if he felt that the same learning benefits could have been achieved using another medium such as a multimedia production, a website, or a video without captions, one teacher emphatically stated :

It appears that many of the benefits of video captioning--such as performance-based assessment and the use of a visual medium to convey meaning--are unique to this technology and cannot be easily achieved using traditional media such as print.

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