Using Student Videos as Test Corrections/Reassessments

Each year, I seem to dabble around with 3-4 different methods of implementing some form of a retake policy.  Though I desperately want to just fully commit to one policy, the lack of my own satisfaction after the policy had been implemented continued to hang around.  Usually, the frustration with coming up with an effective policy would revolve around a few consistent factors:

1. The amount of work that I had to put in to make the policy successful was significantly greater than the amount of work that my students had to put in to achieve points back on their original assessment score.
2. The evidence that would be expected for the students to provide in order to demonstrate that they had learned from their mistakes was hard to identify.  Some students would do a great job at writing out what exactly they did wrong and why their new answer is correct while others either lacked the reasoning/communication skills to provide evidence of learning or they would simply get lazy with their evidence and focus primarily on the right answer.
3. The whole logistics of it.  Is it OK to let students take the test home and correct their answers?  If there is going to be an actual reassessment, does it have to be done on a certain day?  Should students correct their test with me physically present in the room?  Do you give full points back?  What if a student's explanation/answer is still incorrect on the test correction?  Can anyone come in at any time to do their corrections?  Once corrections are made, is that sufficient evidence for me to bump up their grade?  There are many others questions that I had (and still have) that have made the logistics of a test correction/test retake a logistics nightmare.

OK, so to summarize.....

1. Too much work for me
2. What evidence would convince me that learning has occurred? 
3. Logistics nightmare

After taking some time to think about these things, I started to focus more on the evidence portion of my concern and try to figure out my other concerns once I knew exactly what I expected from my students.  What would really convince me that a student has learned from his original mistake?  Well, he would need to be presented with a new situation that would require the same reasoning and conceptual skills as the original situation.  He would also need to explain his reasoning throughout the problem so that I know there is no masking of true understanding (i.e. memorizing a process or an answer).  Lastly, he would obviously need to have the correct answer.

Ideally, I wish I could have a 1-on-1 sit down with each student who is interested in learning from their original mistakes.  I would give them an opportunity to go to the whiteboard and draw or explain to me whatever they needed.  I could hear them think out loud as they were solving problems on the board.  However, I have 170 students and this is not an ideal world.  Such a task would bring me back to my logistical nightmare.  

So if it's really the explanatory evidence that will convince me that learning has occurred, how can I provide my students with an opportunity to demonstrate such evidence?  This is where the app Explain Everything came in.  Explain Everything is essentially a screencasting tool that allows the user to record everything they draw and say.  It allows the easy import of pictures, videos, pdfs and it has a million features that make the app really intuitive and highly effective for creating tutorials.  I've even taken advantage of this app for the past year to make all of my tutorials for my classes.  

The general idea was simple: students will create videos (screencasts) that will demonstrate their new understanding of specific learning objectives.

Because the questions on my tests were tied to specific learning objectives, students would first have to identify which learning objectives they had the most trouble with and identify how many points they lost for each learning objective.  In order to make this process easier, I created this reassessment form.  Once completed, the student would have to submit this form into our LMS Schoology so that I could easily refer to it at any time.

For each learning objective, I created a new set of questions that were identical in number.  In other words, if there were 5 questions on the test tied to objective 12-3, then I created 5 new questions that required similar reasoning skills to demonstrate understanding of that objective.  Once the questions were created, I placed them into a pdf.  Because I had 6 learning objectives on this test, I made 6 pdfs.  All pdfs were uploaded to Schoology so that the students could easily access them.

From there, students would need to import each pdf (learning objective) that they were interested in reassessing into their Explain Everything screencast and record themselves solving each problem.  

Because the majority of my students had never been placed in a situation where they needed to make a screencast, I could tell it made many of them a bit uncomfortable--which is understandable.  However, one thing I can definitely attest to is the fact that watching and listening to their videos gave me an insight into their thought process that wouldn't have been possible before.  Not only was I able to identify mistakes in writing but, most importantly, I was able to easily listen for misconceptions in reasoning.  On the other hand, I was also able to to easily listen for great examples of perfect reasoning.  While some of the student videos were rather dull and straight to the point, several videos made use of their creativity and it was clear that significant time was spent in thinking how to achieve the idea of "how do I explain this problem to my teacher"?  I've included a couple sample videos below:

Sample Vid #1

Sample Vid #2

Sample Vid #3

The above videos aren't without mistakes within them.  But the whole idea is that it was VERY clear to me what a student knew and what a student doesn't seem to quite understand.  Sometimes it's easy to identify misconceptions simply based on work.  But sometimes it's not.  Allowing myself to actually hear them explain their thought process allows this ambiguity to go away and for evidence of learning (or lack of it) to be clear.  

After creating the video, students were required to submit it to Schoology like they would a regular assignment.  The satisfied the logistics problem since all videos were in one spot and I could watch them whenever I wanted.  

As far as the work for me, all I had to do was watch and take simple notes on their reassessment form that was submitted.  Based on the time length of their video, this process was simple.  Next time I'll put a cap on how long a video can be.  A couple samples of what I did while simultaneously watching the video are below:

Though there are still things that I want to tweak about this process, it really was the first time that I was satisfied with the evidence provided of student learning.  I think student videos could be a great tool for assessments in the future and I'm going to continue to find ways to incorporate them into my classroom.