Does increasing social presence enhance the effectiveness of writing explanations?

Abstract

Writing explanations has demonstrated to be less effective than providing oral explanations, as writing triggers less amounts of perceived social presence during explaining. In this study, we investigated whether increasing social presence during writing explanations would aid learning. University students (N = 137) read an instructional text about immunology; their subsequent task depended on experimental condition. Students either explained the contents to a fictitious peer orally, wrote their explanations in a text editor, or wrote them in a messenger chat, which was assumed to induce higher levels of social presence. A control group retrieved the material. Surprisingly, we did not obtain any differences in learning outcomes between experimental conditions. Interestingly, explaining was more effortful, enjoyable, and interesting than retrieving. This study shows that solely inducing social presence does not improve learning from writing explanations. More importantly, the findings underscore the importance of cognitive and motivational conditions during learning activities.

Learning-by-Teaching Without Audience Presence or Interaction: When and Why Does it Work?

“…The findings showed that non-interactive teaching improved test performance compared to restudy, while summarizing was not more effective than restudy. Moreover, teaching was more enjoyable than both summarizing and restudying, which mediated the effect of non-interactive teaching on test performance (see Jacob et al, 2021, for similar evidence in a controlled laboratory setting). One has to be cautious with interpreting these findings, however, as an alternative explanation for both the motivational and learning benefits of creating a non-interactive teaching video is that this was a more novel activity for the children than summarizing or restudying.…”

“…Third, a relatively novel perspective that has gotten distinct attention in recent research is the social presence view (Hoogerheide et al, 2016a(Hoogerheide et al, , 2019aJacob et al, 2020aJacob et al, , 2021Lachner et al, 2021). Social presence was originally defined as the extent to which people are aware of others in a technology-mediated setting and view those others as real (Short et al, 1976).…”

“…The experiments that did explicitly test the underlying mechanisms by experimentally manipulating degrees of social presence during teaching (e.g., Hoogerheide et al, 2020b;Lachner et al, 2021) suggested that social presence during non-interactive teaching may be regarded as a double-edged sword, as high levels of social presence impaired rather than contributed to learning. There is some evidence to suggest that the motivational component of social presence accounted for the effectiveness of learning by non-interactive teaching, as increases of motivation could explain potential effects of non-interactive teaching (Hoogerheide et al, 2019b;Jacob et al, 2021).…”

“…These findings could be explained from a cognitive load perspective, as writing explanations may be more cognitively demanding and more time-consuming, because writing is a less automated process compared to speaking (see Cleland & Pickering, 2006;Sperling, 1996). However, with the exception of Hoogerheide et al, (2016a), none of the studies revealed differences between written and oral non-interactive teaching on measures of subjective cognitive load (Jacob et al, 2020a(Jacob et al, , 2021Lachner et al, 2018). In line with the social presence view, social presence is discussed as an alternative theoretical account for why modality matters, as writing may trigger lower levels of social presence than speaking (Hoogerheide et al, 2016a;Jacob et al, 2020a).…”

“…Note, however, that despite the fact that these experiments manipulated the core components of the social presence construct (i.e., degree of awareness/realness of audience), none of these experiments had an explicit measure of social presence, so there was no manipulation check, which warrants caution. Another study by Jacob et al (2021) aimed at manipulating social presence through the teaching task-rather than the audience-by asking students to explain via a messenger chat including additional social cues, such as the recipients profile picture and a query message by the potential recipient (higher social presence) or to explain via a text editor without any social cues. The authors found that students in the messenger condition included more personal references, as potential behavioral proxy for social presence.…”