2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Research on student-created content videos (SCCVs) has highlighted their benefits in promoting active participation, reducing cognitive load, fostering creativity, and enhancing student independence. However, the specific effects of student-created review videos (SCRVs) in computing courses remain under-explored. This study examined the impact of SCRVs as a computer-based study method on student exam performance in early computing courses. This experimental study was conducted in two different courses, Course A and Course B, at a large public university in the southeastern United States during Spring 2024. Both courses had two exams, one mid-term and one final. In each course, students were randomly assigned to an experimental group, who were tasked with creating SCRVs for the mid-term examination, and a control group, who were not. After the mid-term, student groups were swapped. Thus, the original control group created an SCRV for the final examination while the original experimental group did not. We compared the exam scores of students by condition. We also compared the exam scores of students within the experimental group in Course A based on whether they submitted in the last 3 hours before the deadline or not. The motivation for this comparison was to investigate if a student’s self-regulation correlated with exam scores. 3 hours was chosen because it was determined to be a reasonable time in which the student could fully and meaningfully complete the SCRV assignment. In Course A, the creation of an SCRV was added as a mandatory assignment to the course, even if students did not participate in the research study. In Course B, participation was entirely optional as participating would result in a 1% extra credit increase but there were also other options outside this study to receive this increase. We found that, in Course B, the average exam score was higher in the experimental group, while in Course A, there was no statistically significant difference. We also found that early video submission (more than 3 hours before the due date) was correlated with higher exam scores and vice versa.