Learning-by-teaching is a generative learning strategy in which students are asked to teach what they are learning to others (Fiorella & Mayer, 2015). In this study, college students watched a multimedia lesson on chemical synaptic transmission with instructions that afterward they would explain the materials by making a lecture video…

Generative learning theory posits that learners engage more deeply and produce better learning outcomes when they engage in selecting, organizing, and integrating processes during learning. The present experiments examine whether the generative learning activity of generating explanations can be extended to online multimedia lessons and whether…

Background: How to improve learning with online multimedia lessons has attracted widespread concern. Prior studies have attempted to help students learn by breaking a video lesson into several segments. However, there has been a debate about whether learners can use pause time effectively and whether prompting them to engage in different types of…

Game-like educational apps are intended to boost learner motivation leading to better learning outcomes. To test this idea about the value of gamification, college students (n = 64) learned Italian by playing the online language learning game, Duolingo at home for seven sessions, or learned the same material through watching an online slideshow…

This paper presents a personal account of developments in research on online learning over the past 30 years. Research on how to design online instruction represents an example of applying the science of learning to education. It contributes to the science of learning (as exemplified by developments in cognitive load theory, the cognitive theory…

This study examined the impacts of 2 different graphic organizers (filled-in graphic organizers and interactive graphic organizers) on middle school students' learning processes, outcomes, experiences, and preferences. In Experiment 1, 60 students were assigned to read a short expository passage in 1 of 3 conditions: text-only, filled-in graphic…

Generative learning involves actively making sense of to-be-learned information by mentally reorganizing and integrating it with one's prior knowledge, thereby enabling learners to apply what they have learned to new situations. In this article, we present eight learning strategies intended to promote generative learning: summarizing, mapping,…

The present study examines the existing published research about the effectiveness of learner-generated highlighting and instructor-provided highlighting on learning from text. A meta-analysis was conducted of scientifically rigorous experiments comparing the learning outcomes (i.e., performance on memory and/or comprehension tests) of students…

Background: Learning-by-teaching is a generative learning strategy in which students are told they will have to teach what they are learning to others. Although learning-by-teaching has been shown to be effective in some cases, few studies have established guidelines for how to optimize the benefits of learning-by-teaching as a generative learning…

One approach to encourage productive study strategies is to incorporate preparatory quizzes (or pre-quizzes) in which students are required to submit answers to questions before the underlying material is covered in class. In the present study, students took an introductory mechanical engineering class that either included pre-quizzes (treatment…

How does the emotional tone (happy or sad) and gender (male or female) of the instructor's computer-generated voice in a multimedia lesson affect learning processes and outcomes for female learners (Experiment 1) and male learners (Experiment 2)? In two experiments, college students viewed a 2.5 min narrated slideshow on the formation of lightning…

In 2 experiments, college students read a 4-paragraph text on how the human circulatory system works and were instructed to form a mental image of the events described in each paragraph from the perspective of their own body (first-person perspective group) or from the perspective of a fictitious person facing them (third-person perspective…

Background: With the rapid popularization of e-learning, how to improve online learning has aroused widespread concern. A human-like pedagogical agent (PA) that displays eye gaze and gestures, is often added to online multimedia lessons to increase social connection and improve learning in e-learning environments. However, there has been a debate…

The positivity principle states that people learn better from instructors who display positive emotions rather than negative emotions. In two experiments, students viewed a short video lecture on a statistics topic in which an instructor stood next to a series of slides as she lectured and then they took either an immediate test (Experiment 1) or…

Previous studies have shown that students learn better from an online lesson when a gesturing pedagogical agent is added (Mayer & DaPra, 2012; Wang, Li, Mayer, & Liu, 2018). The goal of this study is to pinpoint which aspect of a gesturing pedagogical agent causes an improvement in learning from an online lesson. College students learned…