A study of an segmenting learning video technique to improve learning achievement for elementary school students

With the advance of information technology, video on the web (such as, Youtube) had been a common and convenient channel for learning by students. But the characteristics of transient information in videos are easy to impose a high cognitive load to students, especially for elementary school students. Because video is not a single text or a single image, which has rich colors and complex scenarios. Video requires the students to watch it attentively, otherwise it is possible to misunderstand the meaning of the context and lose clues involved in the scenarios. Due to that the frames in the video are continuously broadcasted one-by-one, about 20–30 frames per second, students not only need to quickly engage the possible messages between the previous frame with the next one, but also need to integrate the messages with their existing knowledge. Obviously, this a difficult job for students with limited short-term memory, which leads to a cognitive load problem and reduces learning effectiveness. To solve this problem, Video-segmentation was known as an instructional technique that advocates dividing the learning video into meaningful segments to reduce cognitive load. However, all the related researches showed that Video-segmentation instructional technique can raise the learning achievement only for inexperienced learners. Oppositely, it will be not only no effectiveness but also have negative consequences for experienced learners, which is called the Expertise Reversal Effect. Therefore, this paper propose a new novel approach to adaptively divide the video based on learners' prior knowledge and grade to meaningful segments for each student. Such an approach could reduce learners' cognitive load and improve the learning achievement. The results show that there indeed exists Expertise Reversal Effect of segmentation in terms of scores of higher-prior knowledge students in the control group. In experimental group, scores of post-test are significantly superior to scores of pre-test for mid-prior and lower-prior knowledge students.