Comparing video styles and study strategies during video-recorded lectures: effects on secondary school mathematics students' preference and learning

Despite the increasing popularity of using video-recorded lectures, we still understand little about how different video styles and study strategies during video lectures may affect student learning. In this paper, we present a systematic investigation of video-recorded lectures in the context of secondary school mathematics education. Study 1 investigated students' (n = 24) preferences and teacher's comments regarding six different video styles in a flipped learning environment. Study 2 consisted of two stages and examined the learning effects of different video styles and study strategies. In Study 2A, we randomly assigned 129 students to one of the three most preferred video styles from Study 1. No significant difference was found among the three video styles in terms of learning performance. Nevertheless, Khan-style + teacher's talking head videos required the least teacher effort and registered the highest mean scores in both the recall and application questions. Study 2B thus focused on this video style and randomly assigned 87 students to two different study strategies: interpolated short-answer quizzes and interpolated copying of worked answers. The results suggest that the interpolation of video lectures with short-answer quizzes significantly improves students' ability to solve novel problems. Overall, we recommend that teachers use Khan-style + teacher's talking head videos with interpolated short-answer quizzes in the future practice of video-recorded lecturing for secondary school mathematics.