Personal Captioning Project
Sept. 1993 - Feb. 1997
NCAM and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology (NTID) investigated a promising multimedia approach to literacy and learning— student captioning technology. Students worked on literacy and related skills as they controlled video and created text, which they superimposed on the video (like TV captions). Project staff evaluated implementation of the technology in schools and researched ways that learning could be enhanced through its use.
The Personal Captioning Project was conducted at six school sites— three whose students were deaf or hard of hearing, and three that had students with language-related learning disabilities. Among the sites were both integrated and separate settings, with students ranging in age from six to 17. Seventeen teachers participated, six of them for all three years. Project staff provided training and ongoing technical support for teachers, and collaborated on designing promising captioning activities that met the teachers' educational objectives.
Teachers and researchers developed a broad range of learning activities which integrated captioning across the curriculum. Some of the activities were exploratory while others occurred on a sustained basis, allowing data to be correlated with captioning activities and learning gains. Qualitative data were collected on student motivation and attitudes, teachers' attitudes and comfort level, teachers' perceptions of students' language and cognitive skills, conditions of effective implementations, and others.
Captioning activities were most effective when teachers provided:
- clear objectives of the captioning activity to students, which were consonant with the curriculum
- targeted feedback related to the objectives, which students could apply in subsequent activities, captioning and otherwise
- a clear structure and sequence for the activity
- situations for the students to be increasingly independent with the technology and experience success.
Specific writing skills improved for some students; other students retained more content knowledge of material they captioned compared with material they did not caption. Other skills and behaviors that seemed to improve included organization, independence, self-assessment skills, teamwork, self-confidence, and patience. The optimal age appeared to be upper elementary and middle school. Students in that range had the requisite keyboarding and writing skills, and teachers had flexibility within the curriculum and school day to integrate captioning activities.
Project results have been disseminated through conference presentations, teacher training workshops, journal articles, a videotape, ¡Captioning Kids!, and a handbook, Writing with Video: an idea book for captioning in the classroom.
For more information, contact:
Mardi Loeterman
Project Director
CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media
WGBH Educational Foundation
125 Western Avenue
Boston, MA 02134
617 300-3400 (voice/TTY)
617 300-1035 (fax)
Mardi_Loeterman@wgbh.org
