Edu-Snippets
Taking photos in class, learning through teaching, animated GIFs in PowerPoint
Highlights
Students who take longhand notes have better recall of a lecture than students who take photos of lecture materials and later study those photos.
You can deepen student understanding of concepts by asking them to teach those concepts to others.
Decorative animations on PowerPoint slides impair student recall of material.
Take notes, not photos
Smartphones are ubiquitous. In classrooms and lecture halls, students will sometimes use their smartphone cameras to take photos of course materials (e.g., blackboards, PowerPoint presentations) for later study purposes. Some students feel this reduces or eliminates the need for note-taking, since the camera captures much of the information they require.
Is it a good idea to replace note-taking with photo taking? In a recent study, Wong and Lim (2023) examined this question. They conducted two experiments involving 200 university students. All 200 students watched the same lecture but they did so in three different ways. One group took handwritten notes. Another group took photographs of the lecture materials for later study. The third group took no notes at all.
Following the lecture, students were provided with study time. Photo-takers and no-note-takers were given an opportunity to review the lecture slides and a verbal transcript via their photos or printouts. The longhand note-takers were only allowed to review their own handwritten notes. Once the study period was over, all students were tested on their recall of the material.
Results: Students who took photos performed worse than those who took handwritten notes. In fact, the photo-takers didn’t perform any better than students who didn't take any notes at all.
The authors suggest that handwritten note-taking has considerable value because it requires students to more actively attend to the lecture, process its content, and try to make sense of it. This results in a greater retention of knowledge. A related finding of this study was that the handwritten notetakers reported lower levels of mind-wandering than the other two groups, due to their increased focus on the lecture content. In conclusion, while smartphones offer convenient ways to capture information, using photos as a replacement for note-taking is not effective.
This study also revealed that many students aren’t aware of the value of taking notes by hand. Participants in this study incorrectly predicted that all three learning methods would produce comparable results on the recall test. They were unaware of the beneficial cognitive effects of note taking. This highlights the need for educators to talk to students about effective and ineffective study habits. Taking photos of lecture slides is easy, but it is not a substitute for note-taking.
Learning-by-teaching is an effective instructional strategy, even when the audience is imaginary
Learning-by-teaching is an educational approach in which students deepen their understanding of a subject by teaching it to others. To teach effectively, a student must organize their thoughts and figure out how to present the material in a coherent fashion. They think about how to explain each concept and try to anticipate sources of confusion. While planning, they might also discover holes in their own understanding that need to be filled. All of these mental processes help solidify and deepen their own understanding of the material.
A wealth of research suggests that the act of teaching confers cognitive benefits on the teacher, enhancing their understanding (e.g., Bargh & Schul, 1980). In a recent study in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Cheng, Wang and Mayer (2023) compared different learning-by-teaching approaches to determine which was most conducive to learning. They began by teaching new material to 80 college students. Following the lesson, each student was assigned one of the following tasks:
Explain the new material by teaching in front of a camera to an imaginary audience;
Explain the new material to themselves by explaining it aloud;
Explain the new material to another student, face-to-face;
Explain the new material to another student over videoconference; or
Simply restudy the new material.
Interestingly, the most effective condition was the one in which students taught in front of a camera to an imaginary audience. This produced better explanations than self-explaining, restudying, or teaching to an actual audience. The authors theorize that for many students, the anticipation of teaching in front of people can evoke negative emotions (stress, nervousness, fear) that consumes working memory and hinders learning.
This research has immediate instructional applications. Teachers might consider creating assignments in which students are prompted to explain a concept to an imaginary audience by creating a talking head video or an oral recording. By constructing these explanations, students should deepen their understanding of the content.
Decorative animations (animated GIFs) in PowerPoint presentations can impair recall
Animations can be useful educational tools. They have been shown to be helpful when teaching students how complex, dynamic systems work (e.g., how a pump moves water, or how an internal combustion engine operates). However, there exists another class of animations, referred to as “decorative animations” (or “animated GIFs”), that do not convey information, but add interest and visual appeal to presentations. These are quite popular; many such animations are included with presentation packages like PowerPoint. Is it a good idea to include decorative animations in your lessons?
In a recent experimental study, Pink and Newton (2020) investigated whether the use of decorative animations in presentations affects learning. The researchers conducted two separate experiments with first-year undergraduate STEM students on different topics (human physiology and enzyme kinetics). Two different topics were chosen to control for the possibility of content-specific effects. The results of both experiments revealed that students had lower recall of content that was presented with decorative animations compared to still images. These findings suggest that decorative animations impose additional extraneous cognitive load1 that hampers learning. The study concluded that animations should only be used in presentations when they are the focus of learning activities, rather than for visual appeal and/or engagement purposes.
The study’s findings offer an excellent example of the “seductive details effect”. This effect refers to situations in which the inclusion of interesting but irrelevant content impairs comprehension by drawing attention away from core information. Removing “seductive details” from a presentation can produce learning gains.
References
Bargh, J. A., & Schul, Y. (1980). On the cognitive benefits of teaching. Journal of Educational Psychology, 72(5), 593–604.
Cheng, M., Wang, F., & Mayer, R. E. (2023). Benefits of asking students to make an instructional video of a multimedia lesson: Clarifying the learning‐by‐teaching hypothesis. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12823
Pink, A., & Newton, P. M. (2020). Decorative animations impair recall and are a source of extraneous cognitive load. Advances in Physiology Education, 44(3), 376–382. https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.00102.2019
Wong, S. S. H., & Lim, S. W. H. (2023). Take notes, not photos: Mind-wandering mediates the impact of note-taking strategies on video-recorded lecture learning performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 29, 124–135. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000375
Extraneous cognitive load refers to unnecessary load on a person’s working memory produced by irrelevant material. It consumes working memory resources that could otherwise be used for learning.
Learning by teaching is great! Great method and also shows leadership amongst students. Hands down one of the best strategies.
I think writing notes is good, but the issue is, it assumes the student is engaged with the learning and they are motivated to write notes. This leads to the question that teachers might have, how to convince students to write notes or be engaged in the class. If all students wrote notes and stayed engaged in class that would be amazing. I think that is a bigger question.
As "an old man with a young age", I often find myself resorting to good, old, and reliable methods of doing things, including taking notes by hand. The first section of this article resonates with the reason why retrieval practice and interleaving are effective: these methods require the brain to work harder, hence more effectively transfer information from the working memory to the long term memory.
For learning-by-teaching, I realized its benefits since a very young age. I often explained homeworks and course materials to my classmates since primary school. What I did not realize is that teaching in front of an imaginary audience is more effective than doing so in front of actual audience. The explanation regarding cognitive load on the working memory makes sense, and the proposed application worked perfectly: while I was creating the microlesson and a courtesy online course, I was able to sense the skill-honing effect!
I have always excluded decoratives in PPT since CTL1620. I did this during my microteaching session in the Advanced University Teaching Preparation Certificate program, and it worked well. One of the students in the microteaching session mentioned that light text in a dark background works better than dark text in a light background, because the human eyes tend to focus on illuminated objects. What are your thoughts on this?