Background: Attentiveness during class is critical for learning. Teachers have strategies to promote active engagement and active learning, yet little control over students' baseline level of alertness and focus upon arriving to class. Objective: To evaluate the effect of pre-lecture cognitive exercise on attention and learning in lectures.…

Under the appropriate conditions, oscillatory chemical reactions have the capacity to generate chemical waves and spatial patterns. Among these structures, Turing patterns are a distinct class that, to date, has not been commonly demonstrated in a classroom environment. We present here a novel, practical procedure for the demonstration of Turing…

Video lectures in massive open online courses (MOOCs) provide an opportunity to not only deliver instructional content but also engage learners. While there are many different styles of video lectures, it is not clear how video styles affect learner engagement. This study analysed and critiqued different typologies of video styles and classified…

Instructional videos have been increasingly critical to afford effective learning experiences in online courses, but most videos follow a lecturing monolog delivery format. This format tends to lead students to observe the videos passively. Previous laboratory studies have indicated that observing dialog videos of an instructor tutoring a tutee…

Background: Practice tests have been shown to be an effective means to foster long-term retention in higher education, at least compared to restudying (i.e., the testing effect). Objective: The present study replicated and extended prior research by examining whether and to what extent the positive effects of testing on long-term retention in a…

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, students have more choice of how to attend courses than ever before; for a large number of courses at a technical university, they are still able to watch the lectures live online or in recorded format later. We found that interactivity may bring back students into the classroom almost as effectively as…

While previous studies have shown that L2 listeners tend to focus more on videos with additional information, like presentation slides, the amount of eye gaze did not necessarily translate to higher listening test scores . Unlike previous research focusing on the benefits of additional visual cues, this study explores how emotions impact L2…

Background: Leaderboards are a highly popular gamification component used in student learning to enhance motivation, attentional engagement, and learning performance. However, few studies have examined the effects of individual leaderboard elements on English vocabulary learning through video lectures. Objectives: The present study aimed to…

Video lectures are considered as one of the primary media to cater good-quality educational content to the learners. The video lectures illustrate the course-relevant concepts with necessary details. However, they sometimes fail to offer a basic understanding of off-topic concepts. Such off-topic concepts may spawn cognitive overload among the…

A previous meta-analysis found that active learning has a positive impact on learning achievements for college students in STEM fields of study. However, no similar meta-analyses have been conducted in the humanities and social sciences. Because major dissimilarities may exist between different fields or domain of knowledge, there can be issues…

COVID-19 greatly increased the online delivery of higher education. But one limitation of online learning is that students often struggle to stay engaged while watching online lectures. We examined whether including an instructor's face in lecture videos (instructor visibility) enhances student engagement or learning. In two preregistered…

This study investigated the effect of video lecture types on the performance of students in computational problem-solving practices. A total of 19 university students participated in the computational problem-solving practices that mostly required declarative knowledge, and 22 university students participated in the computational problem-solving…

This study explores the influence that an educational intervention has on students generating requirements for a design task. An experiment was performed in a fourth-year mechanical engineering design course by giving the participants a design problem from which they had to generate a list of requirements. A lecture on requirements was given and…

The lecture approach remains a common teaching method in chemistry education. This study aimed to investigate its impact on students' attitudes towards chemistry, focusing on overall, cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions. A pre-test and post-test control group design was employed. This study involved 30 first-year undergraduate…

The content analysis included video lectures posted in 208 MOOCs on the Polish educational platform NAVOICA. The aim was to determine their subject matter and the methods of preparing video lectures. It turned out that video lectures were included in 57% of MOOCs, most often related to "Medical and health sciences" and…