ABOUT WCER NEWS Events Cover Stories Research News International Research Press WHAT'S THE RESEARCH ON...? PROJECTS All Active Projects All Completed Projects PUBLICATIONS LECTURE SERIES PEOPLE Staff Directory Project Leaders ERG - EVALUATION RESOURCES GROUP RESOURCES Conference Rooms Equipment GRANT SERVICES GRADUATE TRAINING SERVICE UNITS Director's Office Business Office Technical Services Printing & Mail EMPLOYMENT CONTACT INFO MyWCER WORKSPACE LOGIN

Multimedia Analysis of Students' Growth

August 2007

Members of the education research community are all too familiar with debates about the value of various research methods. Politicians and researchers alike have vested interests in different methods. Some argue that randomized field trials are the best method in nearly every circumstance. But others argue that comprehensive case studies offer value as well. Mixes of qualitative and quantitative methods can be ideal, depending on circumstances.

Let’s take a particular example. Children’s development in a mathematics classroom can be measured by tests, of course. But much of what goes on in the classroom is not captured and not evaluated by tests. Capturing and analyzing classroom discussion and student/teacher interactions reveals vital information about teaching and learning. Researchers capture this information via audio and video recording. Video analysis is useful not only for research, but it can be a powerful tool for professional development when teachers watch videos of their own teaching.

Videotape has been used as a research tool for some time, but with the advent of digital technology, researchers who analyze recorded classroom interactions no longer have to work with bulky tape cartridges and suffer through the time-consuming process of rewinding and fast forwarding.

Qualitative data analysis software is nothing new. nVivo and NUD*IST have been around for a long time. They’re used by sociologists, market researchers, lawyers, and psychologists, among others, to manage and analyze textual data. But these tools don’t incorporate video data.

Transana, developed at WCER by David Woods, Chris Fassnacht, and colleagues, is software that lets researchers easily transcribe and analyze digital video of classroom interactions. Researchers can select and categorize analytically important segments of video from large video collections, and they can add analytic codes to the video for fast, flexible retrieval. They can also produce a variety of analytic maps, graphs, and reports to help them gain insight into what this incredibly rich and dense data source has to show.

For example, researchers at WCER use Transana to watch the development of students’ growth in mathematical reasoning over the course of a couple semesters in a classroom. Pam Asquith, Suyeon Kim, and colleagues code and notate classroom interactions, noting students’ and teachers’ physical gestures as they talk. Conversations are analyzed in terms of who poses a question, the quality of the student’s response, follow-up discussion, and teachers’ scaffolding. Transana is particularly well suited for studying the gestures of students and teachers, says Pam Asquith of WCER’s project, Understanding and Cultivating the Transition from Arithmetic to Algebraic Reasoning. Gesture analysis is prominent in psychology, she says, and Transana helps her team measure the growth of students’ reasoning in mathematics classrooms.

When Suyeon Kim highlights a line of text in the transcript, the corresponding video segment automatically plays in an adjoining window. She measures the length of pauses in the conversation. She codes teacher-student interactions according to the degree of student-centeredness and the degree to which they perpetuate discourse. For example, she codes a conversational segment with IRE to indicate teacher Initiation, student Response, and teacher Evaluation. The code IRF means teacher Initiation, student Response, and then Follow-up questions with probing. The code IDE means student or teacher Initiation, student Demonstration, followed by student or teacher Evaluation.

Transana has been downloaded by researchers the world wide, more than 45,000 times. And until very recently Transana was available for free download. But expenses of maintaining and updating the software have made it necessary to charge $50 for the single-user version. Transana's lead developer David Woods wasn’t happy about having to charge, but it’s a necessary step. He explains that funds available through targeted development, donations, and grants were no longer adequate to ensure Transana's ongoing development, “So we chose to start charging rather than to reduce the amount of time being devoted to developing and supporting the program.”

Because Transana is open-source, users can download the program's full source code and customize it to meet their own needs, and are encouraged to share their program changes with all Transana users by submitting their changes to the development team. Users who desire custom built extensions but lack the necessary programming skills can also help fund Transana's ongoing development to have them built by Woods and his colleagues.