The Bionic Falcon: Increase learning with a single click: turn on the captions

(Image from "Export a Video with Captions," from TechSmith.com)

Want your students to understand more when they watch videos about content? All it takes is one click:

Turn on the captions.

Who doesn't love changes like this? -- simple, low-cost, low-effort interventions that seem likely to yield substantial results.

This wonderful trick was discovered almost by accident: a professor named Robert Keith Collins learned about the power of subtitles when he was tinkering around trying to increase the accessibility of his classes for students with special needs.

He turned on the captions whenever he showed a video, and was surprised to discover that the captions helped ALL students understand the material and remember specifics. The students' grades went up, but the effect was not merely on grades:

Class discussions also became livelier and more detailed, with students recalling specific information shown in the videos such as names of people and places" (SFSU).

Collins attributes this to the ability of captions to help students know what to focus on:

"We're living in an age where our students are so distracted by technology that they sometimes forget where they should focus their attention when engaged with technology or media," he said. "Turning on captions seems to enable students to focus on specific information" (Collins, qtd. in SFSU).

You can read the full article in ScienceDaily, here.

So, next time you show a video, just flip on the captions. Then let me know -- did students retain more detail?

Want to find and play closed captioned videos from Learn360?

Use Advanced Search, and select Include only closed captioned titles.
In the window which shows the video, click on the CC in the upper-right-hand corner to enable captions.
Press play to stream the video for your students. (Download instructions are a little complicated; let me know if you want more information.)

Want to turn on captions for a YouTube video?

Many YouTube videos have automatic captions (though the speech recognition accuracy may vary), and many video creators include captions. If a video has captions, you can turn them on by clicking the captions icon at the bottom of the video. Depending on your location, the captions icon will look like one of the following: