The limited effects of prequestions on learning from authentic lecture videos.

Abstract

Asking questions prior to learning enhances memory. Although this prequestion effect typically applies only to information that was prequestioned and not to other, non-prequestioned information, recent research using short videos found benefits to both prequestioned and non-prequestioned information. In the current study, students viewed authentic video-recorded lectures, each over 20 min, prepared for actual courses on signal detection theory (Experiment 1) and autobiographical memory (Experiment 2). Some students answered prequestions before viewing the videos (prequestion group) and some did not (control group). At final test the prequestion group outperformed the control group overall, as well as specifically for prequestioned information, but performance on non-prequestioned information was either not different from (Experiment 1) or only marginally better than (Experiment 2) the control group. The benefit of prequestions did not interact with subjective interest in the material. These results suggest positive but limited benefits of prequestions for educationally realistic lecture videos.

Pan, Sana, Schmitt, and Bjork (2020) Pretesting reduces mind wandering during online lectures

“…In Experiment 1, the pretesting effect was specific to pretested questions that were identical to those used earlier in the experiment. That finding is consistent with the recent pretesting literature, in which the pretesting effect has repeatedly been shown to exhibit specificity of learning (e.g., Hausman & Rhodes, 2018;James & Storm, 2019;Richland et al, 2009;Toftness et al, 2018). In contrast, we observed positive transfer in Experiment 2, with pretesting improving performance for both pretested and new questions (which is a relative rarity in the pretesting literature; e.g., Carpenter & Toftness, 2017;Pan et al, 2019;St.…”

“…The pretesting effect has been successfully demonstrated across a plethora of educationally-relevant circumstances. Benefits of pretesting have been found for stimuli ranging from semantically-related word pairs and trivia facts (e.g., Kornell et al, 2009) to text passages (e.g., Little & Bjork, 2016) and educational videos (e.g., Toftness et al, 2018), and in both laboratory and classroom settings (e.g., Carpenter et al, 2018). There are also theoretical reasons to expect that pretesting might improve learners' ability to stay focused during lectures and in other pedagogical contexts.…”

“…In both experiments, we measured mind wandering via attention probes presented after each of four parts of the lecture, and assessed any learning benefits via a cumulative final test that included both previously pretested and new questions drawn from the lecture (cf. James & Storm, 2019;Toftness et al, 2018). Additionally, in both experiments we asked participants to provide a metacognitive judgment of learning after viewing the entire lecture (similar to Szpunar et al, 2014), and in the second experiment, we also assessed participants' memory for the pretest questions.…”

“…Following Jing et al (2016) and Toftness et al (2018), it will be important to determine whether the benefits observed in the present experiments generalize to longer lecture videos, to different content domains, and to wholly online courses wherein students are accustomed to web-based lectures and testing activities. Other measures of mind wandering, such as randomly-inserted probes that ask participants to categorize the proportion of task-related and task-unrelated thoughts (e.g., Jing et al, 2016), may also provide further insights into how pretesting influences attention during lectures and allow testing of the hypothesis that attention is greatest for previously pretested content.…”

Selective effects of errorful generation on recognition memory: the role of motivation and surprise

“…This research has produced mixed results. Some experiments have found that pretesting improves subsequent retrieval of the pretested material, but does not benefit other, non-pretested information (Carpenter, Rahman, & Perkins, 2018;Pressley, Tanenbaum, McDaniel, & Wood, 1990;Richland et al, 2009;Toftness, Carpenter, Lauber, & Mickes, 2018). Other studies, by contrast, have found that pretesting improves memory for both pretested and nonpretested information (Carpenter & Toftness, 2017), or that pretesting does not significantly benefit retrieval at all (Geller et al, 2017).…”