Research Questions and Findings

Research Questions

The Chemistry On Screen project seeks to use our data to answer the following questions: 

  1. How well do the most watched chemistry videos for core introductory chemistry concepts incorporate features that support conceptual understanding?
  2. How well do the most watched chemistry videos for core introductory chemistry concepts incorporate the features of quality instructional videos?
  3. What quality criteria are most frequently incorporated into or missing from the most highly viewed videos?
  4. How frequently are videos that meet most/all the criteria for high-quality instruction viewed?

Research Findings

After evaluating the identified set of videos (usually 25-30) on a topic, we prepare a video topic summary that highlights observations, notable patterns, and broad findings for that topic as well as a comparison with previously evaluated topics. We also identify exemplar videos for each topic that illustrate good examples of the different criteria. These can be found on the content information pages for the different topics. We hope that these links and descriptions are useful for instructors who are seeking high-quality videos to share or looking to develop their own high quality videos. In general, we have sought to identify what we view as some of the best videos for a topic, based on the framework, highlighting their overall strengths and weaknesses.

We have also published an article on our work in the Journal of Chemical Education that describes our process in more depth.