Volume 30, Number 1

19

Five Reasons to Add

Instructional Video to
Your Social Science
Instructional Program
Scott M. Petri, Ed. D.: High School
World History teacher, Canvas
MOOC Instructor., So Cal Social
Science Association, PresidentElect, proud CCSS & NCSS
member.
Follow Scotts blog:
http://historyrewriter.com/.

any Social Studies teachers

have embraced the flipped
classroom model. Research indicates that the flipped learning model where students view
video lectures for homework and
practice skills during instructional time has a positive effect on
student achievement. According to
Ed Tech Magazine, teachers who
flip their classrooms are increasing by 30% per year. The trend
is most prevalent in middle and
high school. Most administrators
support these efforts and teachers
report that student engagement is
up as a result of flipping.
Princeton researcher,Laura Du
concluded thatschools that used
flipped or blended learning lessons
performed as well or better on Cali-

fornia statewide standardized tests

than non-blended schools. Flipped/
blended learning wasassociated
with gains of up to 0.84 standard
deviations in math achievement and
up to 0.42 standard deviations in
English-Language Arts.These gains
represented the difference between
Basic and Proficient. My previous work measuring the effects of
flipped instruction/blended learning
activities among a mixed group of
9th and 10th grade students (N=127)
revealed that online assignments featuring flexible deadlines and student
choice lowered class failure rates by
50 percent.
This article will describe some
of the procedures I have used when
flipping or blending my classroom
instruction and the results I have
received from assigning 40 Zaption
Tours to my World History students.
Assigning flipped videos helps me
frontload schema and academic
vocabulary, increases the amount of
checking for understanding I can do
with both individual students and
whole class instruction, teaches my
students to ask questions, allows me
to tap into students preferred learning modalities, and helps me extend
my classroom instruction online.
While I have exclusively used Zaption in this endeavor, there are other
tools such as EdPuzzle and eduCanon that also make instructional
video more interactive. I encourage
you to experiment with whichever
tools you find most user-friendly and
report your results to The NSSSA
Leader.

Front Load Schema and Academic

Vocabulary
Zaption improves videobased learning with interactive content and tools
that engage learners, deepen understanding, and track student progress.
Teachers can quickly add images,
text, quizzes, and discussions to
existing videos from YouTube and
Vimeo and get immediate feedback
on how students interact with the
content and understand key concepts. Zaption changes videobased
learning from a passive experience
to an active learning event that front
loads schema and academic vocabulary prior to conducting close reading or classroom discussions.
In my class, I assign Zaption Tours
as homework. I call them note-taking drills and I use them to preview
the material that students will read in
their textbook. These lectures are no
more than 15 minutes in length and
have 3-5 checking for understanding
questions embedded in each video.
Students view a video, answer the
questions, then read the corresponding chapter section and take a quiz.
During their study of the French
Revolution, my students were assigned five video lectures which
were embedded with 30 questions.
Analytics reveal these were viewed
a total of 540 times with 66% of the
questions answered correctly.
Increase Checking for Understanding
Open-ended questions in the Zaption tours are not graded, but they
provide insight into student understanding. In an answer to one of my
open-ended questions: Why do
you think King Louis XVI tried to
escape to Austria? a student wrote:
so Marie Antoinettes brother the
emperor of Austria would help
them and see if the European rulers
would invade France. This an-

20
swer reflected that only one out of
85 students connected information
from Marie Antoinette: The Journey
to the video lecture. I dont know
what stung worse, the fact that most
students gave a simplistic answer
after spending 30 days reading the
Antonia Fraser biography, or the fact
that most students answered To not
get punished by the people, which
indicates they did not connect any
of the early passages of the book
detailing Marie Antoinettes childhood as the daughter of the emperor
of Austria to our textbook readings
or video lectures.
When the gem below appeared on
my discussion board, it was too late
for me to help this student. They had
not listened to any of my lectures
and they had misunderstood what
they read in the book. Their fundamental lack of WWII knowledge
was at once horrifying and hilarious.
I have learned (the hard way) that
waiting for the end of unit writing
assignment to assess what students
have learned is setting yourself up
for failure. After students have taken
the test and written the essay, they
have no motivation to go back and
review the material no matter how
wrong they were. This year, Zaption
has become my go-to tool as I check
for individual student and whole
class understanding. I now embed
questions in my video lectures
and make my writing assignments
shorter and more frequent, so that I
can immediately assess student understanding and correct any misunderstandings immediately.
Inspire Students to Ask Questions
Researchers understand that student
questions can improve instruction
and increase achievement, however,
students rarely ask their own questions in school (Marzano, Pickering,
& Pollack, 2001). When they do,

The Leader
they ask more memory questions
involving knowledge recall than
all other question types combined
(Rothstein & Santana, 2011). Asking
broad, research-type questions can
be difficult for students because they
dont always have a large enough
knowledge base on a subject to see
relationships and big picture issues.
My classroom experiences have
shown that if I use small groups to
get students to generate their own
questions about a topic, many groups
rely on one or two participants and
the other students are content to be
passive observers. Similarly, when I
try to have whole-class, student-led
discussions only 38% to 60% of my
students participate. ZaptionTours
are helpful for giving students a
safe place to develop their own
questions. Only the teacher sees
them. I use them to encourage
discussion in class, broaden independent research projects, and tap
into student motivation. Zaption
presents this data in tables or discussion board threads for easy teacher
analysis. Discussion data also be
download into Excel spreadsheets
for further analysis.
Open-ended questions in my
WWII video lectures suggested that
my students had extensive background knowledge about the Holocaust. Prior to beginning the unit, I
asked students two open-ended questions:What do you already know
about the Holocaust? What do you
want to know about the Holocaust?
What Id like to know about
the Holocaust was? Who
came up with idea? What kind
of movies there are to watch
about the Holocaust?
I want to learn if any groups
or people tried to rebel over
this power and try to support
and help Jews.
I would like to know why

Jews didnt fight back or resist

because it seem as if the Germans just killed the Jews with
ease.
What I want to know is who
put a stop to all Hitlers terror
and how did people just let
him do that?
What I would like to know is
where did Hitler get all his
ideas about a master race?
I would like to learn about
conspiracy theories and the
psychology of why Hitler
wanted to kill these people.
Was it a mental illness, or was
he simply racist?
I know about the beginning,
middle, and D-Day. I want to
know about the ending of the
war.
I would want to know about
how the German people
reacted to the concentration
camps.
This Zaption Tour was viewed 287
times and 107 students replied to all
the questions. These answers indicated that my students had a high level
of knowledge about the Holocaust
and were ready to engage in selfdirected inquiry. This information in
their answers helped me guide them
toward individual projects they were
intrinsically motivated to complete.
Tap Into Preferred Learning
Modalities
After three years of the flipped
classroom approach, I developed
two hypotheses: 1) Students with
higher reading scores prefer reading the book to viewing the video
lectures; and 2) Students with lower
reading scores prefer viewing the
video lectures to reading the book.
In order to test these hypotheses,
I asked two samples of students

Volume 30, Number 1

to describe which learning format
they preferred. The results soundly
debunked my assumptions. While
both groups of students preferred the
video lectures to the textbook, 36%
of students with lower reading levels
preferred taking notes from the book
rather than viewing video lectures.
Students who favored the video
lecture to the book made comments
like:
I think I am learning more
from the videos because they
give off more information, they
clarify what the topic is about,
and I can rewind the video in
case I didnt get that last piece
of information.
Personally, the video lectures
help a lot more than taking
notes on the book. I can spend
more time on the video, the
book ismore flat. In the video,
main points are emphasized.
Its slightly harder to pick
out key points from the book.
My brain works better when
it comes to listening because
when it comes to reading, my
eyes tend to skim and I can
miss key information.
I like the video lecture better because it tells us what to
write. You can take your time
and you can rewind the video.
In the book, it takes a long
time looking for what information you are going to write
in your notes. When I open
the book its just like no and

21
its not interesting. The book
doesnt capture my attention.
Students who preferred the book to
the video lectures made comments
like:
I think the book helps me better because you can go back
and easily find something you
missed, you can easily flip
through pages to find something, and it is less distracting.
Taking notes from the book
helps you go at your own
pace. You can read as fast or
as slow as you want. The book
is easier to go back to a sentence or paragraph than the
video. The book makes it more
simple because you can study
and annotate in a way that you
will understand.
I work better with books, they
havelesscomplications. I am
a hands-on learner, books get
to the point. Video-lectures
can have complications. WiFi
can go down, you run out of
data, problems can happen.
Books are always there to be
picked up and read.
These results seem to validate my
Zaption approach. When students
view video lectures which preview
vocabulary terms, names and events
first, they are building background
knowledge. Then, when students
encounter these terms, names, and
events in their reading, they have
familiarity with them and it is easier
for the new knowledge to stick.

Regardless of which learning

method students preferwhen these
two methods are paired, the video
acts as an anticipation guide priming the pump in a students memory
and reinforcing the stickiness of the
information in the reading. I have
found that students who view my
Zaption Tours, then read the textbook and immediately take an online
reading quiz get an average of 84%
of the questions right on my end of
unit exam, whereas students who
do not engage in these instructional
activities get an average of 16% of
the same questions correct.
Extend Instruction Time Beyond
The Classroom
Our students are spending more time
online and blended or digital learning is becoming a necessary arrow
in an effective teachers quiver.
Zaption allows teachers to leverage the power of instructional video
in the face to face classroom. This
blending of online and face-to-face
instruction is expected to be standard
practice in in the future (Murphy,
Snow, Mislevy, et al., 2014).
When I have compared the classwork and homework completion
rates of my online assignments to
the completion rates ofmy traditional assignments, I have found that
77% of my students completed their
online classwork and 71% complete
their online homework versus a
70% completion rate for traditional
classwork assignments and a 63%
completion rate for traditional homework assignments. This aligns with
data from a recent Zaption analysis
of 400,000 viewers that showed
that while YouTube viewers only
watch 50% or less of a video before
clicking away, learners watch 78%
of every Zaption video lesson and
answer 90% of the questions embedded within them (Bruner & Walsh,
2016).

22

The Leader

Recommendations for Classroom

Practitioners
Because the flipped approach
has been implemented unevenly
throughout schools and districts,
many Social Science supervisors
are unsure how to support teachers
using the model. Zaption provides
supplementary learning experiences
to accompany regular instruction.
Detailed analytics help teachers
monitor students engagement and
responses then implement deeper
learning experiences as follow-up
instruction. Deeper learning experiences require engaging students
in active knowledge construction,
helping them make connections to
their prior knowledge, and apply
that knowledge in new settings. Start
slow when introducing instructional
videos to your classes. Emphasize
the active learning aspects. Many
parents are concerned about screen
time. Show them how Zaption Tours
turn passive viewing experiences
into active learning sessions. Encourage your teachers to survey their
students perceptions about learning from video and document their
results. I am confident you will find
them significant and positive.
Scott M. Petri is a World History
teacher in the Los Angeles Unified
School District and President-Elect
of the Southern California Social
Science Association.
Excerpts of this article were
previously published at
www.HistoryRewriter.com. Dr. Petri
can be contacted via email at scottmpetri@gmail.com or reached on
Twitter @scottmpetri.
References
Smith, D. F. (2014). How flipped
classrooms are growing and
changing. Ed Tech Magazine.
Retrieved online from http://
www.edtechmagazine.com/

k12/article/2014/06/howflipped-classrooms-are-growing-and-changing
Du, L. (2014). The Potential of K12
Blended Learning: Preliminary Evidence from California
Schools. Princeton University.
Retrieved from https://issuu.
com/lauradu/docs/du-californiablendedlearningpreview
Marzano, R. J., Pickering, D., &
Pollock, J. E. (2001).Classroom instruction that works:
Research-based strategies for
increasing student achievement. ASCD.
Murphy, R., Snow, E., Mislevy, J., Gallagher, L., Krumm, A., & Wei,
X. (2014). Blended learning
report.Michael & Susan Dell
Foundation.
Petri, S.M. (2014). Blended Learning
Experiment Cuts Fail Rate
50%. Retrieved from http://
petridishing.net/2014/05/26/
blended-learning-experimentcuts-fail-rate-50/

for Social Studies

Grades 1-8

Authentic nonfiction and fiction

texts in multiple genres and
modalities provide a staircase
of complexity to:
Build content knowledge
Analyze craft and stucture
Integrate kowledge and ideas

Rothstein, D. & Santana, L. (2011).

Make Just One Change: Teaching Students to Ask The Right
Questions. Harvard Education
Press. Cambridge, MA.
Rothstein, D. & Santana, L. (2014). The
Right Questions. Educational
Leadership. 72(02) October
2014. Retrieved from http://
www.ascd.org/publications/
educational-leadership/oct14/
vol72/num02/The-Right-Questions.aspx
Stigler, J. W., Geller, E. H., & Givvin,
K. B. (2015). Zaption: A Platform to Support Teaching, and
Learning about Teaching, with
Video. Journal of e-Learning
and Knowledge Society, 11(2).
Bruner, R. & Walsh, C. (2016). Does
78% Make The Grade?
Retrieved from http://blog.zaption.com/ost/138753103134/
zaption-increases-engagement

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