Understanding Science Through Captioning

Executive Summary

Rubin-Mindell, Amy (2000)

The Understanding Science through Captioning project, including the development of an online teacher's handbook, was funded by the National Science Foundation, Program for Persons with Disabilities, NSF Grant No. HRD-9712964.

The Understanding Science through Captioning project united an innovative captioning technology (ULTimate CaptionWorks™) with the Clarke School for the Deaf Science Curriculum, focusing on curriculum for grades 6-9. Researchers tested this approach at the Clarke School for the Deaf (Northampton, MA), the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (Boston, MA), the Rhode Island School for the Deaf (Providence, RI), and the Silas Deane Middle School. Project staff, teachers and curriculum developers modified the Clarke Science Curriculum to test and determine effective strategies that stem from the use of student-generated captioning--a method of expression in which students write directly on top of video and record a captioned version complete with their own commentary. Student-generated captioning was used for the purpose of clarifying, organizing, and demonstrating students' knowledge about scientific concepts and to provide an engaging venue for language development.

Our research findings suggest that this instructional approach is highly flexible and adaptable for different settings and populations. While this approach was evaluated primarily with middle school students with hearing impairments, it was also replicated in the project's second year in a public school classroom with students with language and learning disabilities. According to qualitative data analysis, the video captioning strategies were found to have benefits for both populations. Video captioning was particularly motivating to our middle school participants, thereby leading us to believe that other middle school students (and perhaps those slightly younger or older), with and without disabilities, would enjoy and benefit from videotaping science experiments and captioning them.

Video captioning makes use of a unique medium not easily replicated by other classroom tools and techniques, promoting essential student learning benefits not easily measured on standardized tests. By supporting diverse instructional objectives such as providing a cognitive window into students' understanding of scientific processes, promoting accountability, review and self-correction, and serving as a powerful means for practicing the translation of ASL to English, video captioning proved to be a flexible and adaptable instructional approach.

Please contact Leslie O'Callaghan (locallaghan@cast.org) at CAST to obtain a copy of the complete research report.