The Video Analysis Tool (VAT) helps users through the evidence-based decision-making process while improving performance or practice and allowing for individual and collaborative feedback.
VAT was developed and refined, in part, through funding by the U.S. Department of Education Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to use Technology (PT3) grant (#P342A030009). The system allows raters, support professionals, and practitioners to engage in the use of video evidence for continuous improvement, support and monitoring of performance and practices. The system’s theoretical framework is adapted from Hannafin, Hill and McCarthy’s (2002) 4-component model for facilitating performance of ill-structured tasks, featuring contexts, tools, scaffolds, and resources.
The Video Analysis Tool provides a means to conduct inquiries, locate key information, mark-up video representations of practices, and otherwise manipulate evidence and communicate findings and recommendations for improvement of teaching practice.
The Video Analysis Tool is a vehicle used for defining and reflecting on evidence of performance or practice. Instructional and learning events are recorded through video cameras and stored for review or analysis. Video evidence may be captured in two forms: live, real-time capture and post-event upload. In live capture, an IP video camera is pre-installed in a classroom, passing video streams to a video server which records the video streams, enabling an individual to observe practices unobtrusively with minimal classroom disruption or interference. Post-event upload refers to archiving video files in the Video Analysis Tool after a recording session. VAT users video-record (digitally or to tape) an event in real-time, and later digitize and upload the converted files to the tool. While increasing the time and effort required for gathering evidence, post-event uploading provides additional backup in the event of network or data transfer failures, as the local video camera can also store the files to be uploaded afterwards.
Video analysis enables raters and practitioners to conduct deep inquiries into teaching-learning practices. They can view a video of specific events and segment the video into smaller sessions of specific interest keyed to defined areas, needs or priorities. Refined sessions, called clips, are especially useful in refining the scope of an inquiry, providing both practitioners, support professionals and raters the ability to observe and reflect without noise or interference of extraneous events.
Raters access captured evidence of practice from a standard computer using the Video Analysis Tool. VAT allows users to create clips, refine clips, view clips, and collaborate electronically about a specific instance of practice. Initially a large piece of video is segmented, providing markers or reminders of where target practices may be examined more deeply through the creation of clips (create video clips). Those clips may later be refined after initial live observation or during post-event review (refine clips). This allows for the rater to make further passes at each segment to define specific, more fine grained activities, such as when a specific math teaching strategies occurred. During refinement, the user defines clips where specific evidence is associated with criteria of interest, such as particular teaching frameworks, career benchmarks, or quality of practice rubrics. The user designates, annotates, and certifies specific events’ clips as representative evidence associated with a target practice, such as a national teaching standard (e.g., NBTC standards). Marked-up, performance evidence can then be accessed and viewed for either a single individual or across participants using the view clips tool. This provides raters with the capability to examine closely the performance of a single individual across multiple events, or multiple individuals across single events. Finally, through the view others’ clips tool, users can share clips and reflections with raters or other practitioners, collaboratively reflecting and comparing their perspectives on an analysis of events.
Users of the Video Analysis Tool may share evidence either face-to-face or asynchronously through a Web-based viewer interface. Group members can view a single piece of evidence, a complete inquiry, and even compare individual pieces (e.g. beginning and end of the semester) of evidence using the view others’ clips tool. Through this interaction, the group sets a joint course of action or contemplates recommendations already tendered for the inquiry.
To assist users in fully utilizing functions of VAT, an online tutorial provides scaffolding in the form of step-by-step operation procedures as well as explanations of what each step means. In addition, users can select help while creating, refining, and defining clips to reveal a pop-up window that provides context-sensitive scaffolding appropriate to each step.