Student Perceptions of Screen Recording and Screencast Assignments in First-Year Writing

The study has IRB approval and participant consent was collected through writing. This data set contains an Excel spreadsheet with multiple tabs for each survey question. The data set includes responses from participants who had consented to participate in the study. Where applicable, the researcher codes are included.
Our study addressed the following research questions:
What prior experience with screen recordings did students in seven different sections of First-Year Writing courses report?
How did students in seven different sections of First-Year Writing courses taught by two different instructors perceive the effects of screen recording assignments on understanding their writing process?
How did those students feel about the screen recording assignments?
We gave students a survey using Microsoft Forms in class during Week 14. We asked them to complete it as part of normal coursework, and if they did not complete the survey in class, then they were to finish it for homework. The survey included questions that helped us determine the levels of experience students reported with both creating and viewing screen recordings (the umbrella term we used during instruction to refer to both screen recordings and screencasts), as well as demographic questions that asked students to state which class they were in. Other close-ended questions asked students to rate their confidence using technology prior to and after completing the course and the number of essays they had revised prior to the class.

Likert-scale questions also ask students to rate the degree to which they agreed with statements related to whether the screen recording assignments helped them “better understand” their writing and research process, their perceptions of the difficulty of the assignments, and whether the assignment helped them “think about my revision practices.” Open-ended questions were included asking students to describe how they felt about the screen recording assignments, the factors that affected their feelings, and how the assignment affected their technology skills.

We argue that the screencast assignment was the most positively received by students because it required students to use transmediation in the writing process, cohesively blending speech, writing, and video components in the writing process. Overall, our research showed that student-led screencasts and screen recordings can offer students unique affordances to incorporate transmodality and multimodality in the writing process.