Students’ active cognitive engagement with instructional videos predicts STEM learning

The efficacy of well-designed instructional videos for STEM learning is largely reliant on how actively students cognitively engage with them. Students' ability to actively engage with videos likely depends upon individual characteristics like their prior knowledge. In this study, we investigated how digital trace data could be used as indicators of students' cognitive engagement with instructional videos, how such engagement predicted learning, and how prior knowledge moderated that relationship. One hundred twenty-eight biology undergraduate students learned with a series of instructional videos and took a biology unit exam one week later. We conducted sequence mining on the digital events of students' video-watching behaviors to capture the most commonly occurring sequences. Twenty-six sequences emerged and were aggregated into four groups indicative of cognitive engagement: repeated scrubbing, speed watching, extended scrubbing, and rewinding. Results indicated more active engagement via speed watching and rewinding behaviors positively predicted unit exam scores, but only for students with lower prior knowledge. These findings suggest that the ways students cognitively engage with videos predict how they will learn from them, that these relations are dependent upon their prior knowledge, and that researchers can measure students’ cognitive engagement with instructional videos via mining digital log data. This research emphasizes the importance of active cognitive engagement with video interface tools and the need for students to accurately calibrate their learning behaviors in relation to their prior knowledge when learning from videos.