The recent emergence and popularity of online educational resources brings with it challenges for educators to optimize the dissemination of online content. Here we provide evidence that points toward a solution for the difficulty that students frequently report in sustaining attention to online lectures over extended periods. In two experiments, we demonstrate that the simple act of interpolating online lectures with memory tests can help students sustain attention to lecture content in a manner that discourages taskirrelevant mind wandering activities, encourages task-relevant note-taking activities, and improves learning. Importantly, frequent testing was associated with reduced anxiety toward a final cumulative test and also with reductions in subjective estimates of cognitive demand. Our findings suggest a potentially key role for interpolated testing in the development and dissemination of online educational content. testing effects | massive open online courses O nline education is quickly becoming a central fixture in the college curriculum. The availability of free online courses with massive enrollments including students from all over the world (e.g., www.edX.org, www.coursera.org, http://2u.com, www. Udacity.com) has developed rapidly and captured widespread public attention. Within brick and mortar colleges, instructors are increasingly making use of flipped classrooms (1), whereby students are encouraged to study lectures on their own time and engage in activities geared toward a more in-depth understanding of the subject matter in the classroom. As such, institutions of higher education have devoted considerable time and effort to making large-scale and highly accessible online repositories of classroom lectures available to both students and the general public. Indeed, recent surveys indicate that students are increasingly using online lectures as a primary learning tool (2). At the same time, little is known about the potential limitations to learning from online lectures and how those limitations can be overcome. For instance, college students frequently report lapses of attention during lectures (3-6), and the tendency to mind wander (7-9) while viewing videotaped lectures has been shown to result in impoverished learning of lecture content (10). Such observations raise the need for rigorous investigations of learning from online lectures. For example, what interventions might remedy the tendency for students to mind wander while viewing online lectures and also allow them to quickly and efficiently extract lecture content? Here we test, and find support for, the hypothesis that interpolating online lectures with memory tests can both reduce the occurrence of mind wandering during lectures and foster task-relevant activities, such as note taking (11), that facilitate learning of lecture content. Our approach is based on recent studies demonstrating that interpolating the study of lists of words (12), face-name pairs (13), and prose passages (14) with memory tests can substantially improve the typically impoverished learning that takes place toward the end of extended study sequences (15). For instance, in one study students learned five lists of words and were told that each list would be followed by a memory test for the most recent list or an unrelated mental activity (12). Moreover, students were told that a computer program would randomly determine the frequency of testing but that there would be a final cumulative test. In fact, there were two testing schedules. One group was tested after every list, whereas another group was only tested after the fifth and final list. Students who were tested after each list learned the final list twice as well as students who had not been tested until the final list. Interpolated testing facilitated the learning of the final list in the study sequence. Interpretations of the facilitative effect of interpolated testing on subsequent learning have focused on a number of cognitive mechanisms that are thought to be at work during encoding [i.e., when students are actively learning (16)] and retrieval [i.e., when students bring study materials back to mind after learning (12, 17) ]. Here we focus on factors operating during encoding (SI Materials and Methods provides discussion, and evidence, of factors operating at retrieval). In particular, recent evidence from cognitive neuroscience (16) and cognitive psychology* suggests that interpolating extended periods of study with memory tests can motivate students to focus on study materials in a manner that benefits learning. For instance, electrophysiological studies of brain activity have demonstrated that lapses of attention are associated with elevated amplitude in the α-frequency band (8-14 Hz) (18-21) and that interpolating extended periods of study with testing can ward off increases in α-power and sustain high levels of learning over time (16). These and related findings carry potentially important implications for learning in real-world contexts, such as lectures, where lapses of attention are frequently reported to disrupt learning (3-6, 10, 11, 22). Nonetheless, the hypothesis that interpolated testing helps students attend to and retain the contents of a lecture remains to be directly tested. Here we conducted a critical test of this hypothesis by directly assessing the extent to which interpolating online lectures with memory tests helped students to resist the tendency to engage in mind wandering and facilitate task-relevant activities (e.g., note taking) in a manner that improves learning. In two experiments (n = 80), students were asked to learn a 21-min video lecture (Introduction to Statistics; further details in Materials and Methods). In each experiment, students were given the lecture slides/notes and instructed to learn the lecture as they would in the classroom. Moreover, students were informed that the video lecture would be divided into four segments and that there would be a break between each segment. During each break, students were told that they would first spend 1 min completing arithmetic problems (unrelated to the lecture) and that the arithmetic problems would be followed by either a 2-min test about the most recent lecture segment or two more minutes of arithmetic problems. In experiment 2, students were told that each
Szpunar et al. REF studied the impact of interpolated tests on learners' loss of attention within online lectures, asking participants to watch a 21-minute video lecture (4 segments with 5.5 minutes per segment) and report their loss of attention in response to random probes (one per segment).
Interpolated memory tests reduce mind wandering and improve learning of online lectures.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Psychology Medicine