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.…

The study investigated the effect of an instructor's positive (vs. neutral) emotions in video lectures on student learning using either easy or difficult geography topics (i.e. easy: the Earth within the universe; difficult: understanding time and date calculations of Earth). The results showed that, first, students responded more positively…

This study explores the role of the instructor's face and eye gaze as social and attentional cues in promoting learning from a video lecture on kidney physiology. In a 2 × 2 between-subjects design, 133 college students were randomly assigned to a gaze behavior condition and a video whiteboard type condition. The instructor either shifted her gaze…

Technology-driven interactions are becoming commonplace, particularly as online classes, telecommuting, and virtual meetings across distances and time zones have all increased in popularity. Platforms such as Google Meet, Skype, Webex, and Zoom use synchronous audio-visual communication supported by text-based chat, emoticon responses, and other…

This quasi-experiment examined how incorporating an instructor narrative into teaching augmented students' recall, affect, and sustained attention. One hundred and ninety-four undergraduate students were assigned to one of two teaching conditions in a college classroom: a lecture that included an instructor narrative summarizing the lesson's key…

The aim of this investigation was to explore student behaviour when students brought their own digital devices into a lecture theatre. A total of 361 undergraduate psychology students from the University of Liverpool who used at least one digital device during lecture time fully completed an online questionnaire (159 first-, 124 second- and 78…

Listen-to-summarize cloze (LSC) tasks are not rare in high-stakes language tests; however, we know little about what test-takers do during the tasks. In our study, we examined 16 students' think-aloud protocols (TAPs) which were recorded while they were completing two LSC tasks. The analysis of the 16 TAPs indicated iterative cognitive processes…

In this study, we applied speech-enabled language translation (SELT) during lectures in a foreign language. The SELT program received input from the instructor's speech and generated translated texts that were shown to students during lectures. We tested the feasibility of our approach specifically with regard to how it facilitates student…

Poor academic performance from extensive social media usage appears to be due to students' inability to multitask between distractions and academic work. However, the degree to which visually distracted students can acquire lecture information presented aurally is unknown. This study examined the ability of students visually distracted by social…

We investigate the use of consumer-grade eye tracking to automatically detect Mind Wandering (MW) during learning from a recorded lecture, a key component of many Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). We considered two feature sets: stimulus-independent global gaze features (e.g., number of fixations, fixation duration), and stimulus-dependent…

Recent research on video lectures has indicated that the instructor's pointing gestures facilitate learning performance. This study examined whether the instructor's pointing gestures were superior to nonhuman cues in enhancing video lectures learning, and second, if there was a positive effect, what the underlying mechanisms of the effect might…

To optimize learning in lectures, students need to maintain a sustained level of attention to the lecture material. Previous research has suggested, however, that student attention declines over the course of the lecture. One strategy suggested to improve sustained attention of students during the lecture is to encourage note-taking by students.…

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of students' seating location in a large, lecture-style university course on student engagement, attention, classroom learning experience, and course performance. Participants (N = 407) were students in two cohorts of an undergraduate financial accounting course at a large university in the…

Consistent with current higher education concerns with student engagement and the student experience, this study explored third-year undergraduate Finance students' experiences of lecture-based active learning tasks. Finance students from the 2012 and 2014 cohorts from a South African university were invited to complete an anonymous questionnaire…

Engaging students in class is paramount if they are to gain a deep understanding of class content. Student engagement is manifested by attention to the various components of instruction. However, there is little research at the tertiary level focusing on what aspects of instruction are related to changes in student attention during class. To…