I agree that "pretesting alerts learners to the kinds of information that they should watch for in the upcoming lesson" (Yang et al., 2021).
Based on pure intuition (not backed up by research), pretesting can help students focus on the most essential contents of the course during lectures. In situations where lecture contents are not "streamlined" (i.e., contain unnecessary details - and this is often the case), pretesting can have an even more substantial effect.
An interesting question is whether a fourth group with both pretest and post-test can significantly outperform any other group. I feel the combined technique would at least be as effective as either pretest or post-test alone.
Since I have a student with learning difficulties, I must design my teaching before any further research results emerge. I would combine pretests and post-tests this way:
1. Ask questions relating to the main structures of the course content in pretests, such as "What is a derivative" in a calculus course.
2. Cover the answers to the pretests in lectures.
3. Cover detailed explanations and scaffolded class exercises in lectures.
4. Ask exam-like questions in post-tests.
I hope this strategy, combined with spaced learning and interleaving, can help my student overcome his learning challenges.
I have successfully helped him once to improve his IELTS band score from 5.5 to 7.0 within 4 weeks, and I hope to successfully help him this time too!
While attention-guiding cues can lower the cognitive load by helping students focus on fewer contents, it is interesting that social cues alone cannot improve learning much. I initially thought that social cues provided by pedagogical agents might work since " teaching presence and social presence explain 69% of the variance in cognitive presence" in the Community of Inquiry model (Cleveland-Innes & Wilton, 2018, p. 14). However, according to the experiment in this study, they did not have such a strong effect on learning improvement.
I constantly feel that learning is a complex process involving cognitive processes, teaching and learning techniques, curriculum design and pedagogy, educational psychology, and much more. The settings in experiments can differ from online class situations. For example, participants in this study may perform differently since they knew they were participating in a one-time learning experiment without any consequences. In a real online class, they may have repeated involvement with the instructor and may have a high stake in their performance. As such, the motivation and behaviors can change, further affecting the course's efficacy.
I often feel that designing experiments to find answers in real-life situations is fun yet challenging. I will need further education to develop knowledge and skills to find answers.
Reference
Cleveland-Innes & Wilton (2018) Chapter 2: Theories Supporting Blended Learning, pages 9 -19 (no need to address the reflection questions in this resource), to learn about the CoI perspective as it relates to blended learning. Available at http://oasis.col.org/handle/11599/3095
I am reminded of a pre-research strategy writers are encouraged to use before they write an essay (or, well, anything at all). Just generate hundreds of questions about the topic/thesis you are working on. Never mind if the answer to many of them is: "I don't know." In fact, the more "I don't knows" you have the better, for those questions are the ones that will lead you in new directions, towards a new synthesis of what you already know with what you will find out in the process of research.
One might liken this to preparing a net before casting it, I suppose.
Pre-questioning in classes or other learning situations would similarly prime the learning mind, alerting it to what it knows and does not know about a subject, perhaps even making it eager to find out those answers (for the mind detests vacuum, or a gap in the gestalt).
I'm sure this strategy would also work for self-learners, and becomes important in this age of the autodidact.
Being Indian, I think of this age as the age of Eklavya. With just an image of his supposed guru in front of him, Eklavya mastered archery. This happened, I am sure, through internal dialogues he conducted, with the guru of his imagination answering the questions he posed, and by trial and error and correction of what he learnt thus -- all by himself.
I think that's a powerful idea for self-learning, and all learning. I speak of both Eklavya's method, and of the pre-questioning strategy, though I know that, in ad libbing this comment, I may not have conveyed the degree of overlap between the two all too well. :-(
I agree that "pretesting alerts learners to the kinds of information that they should watch for in the upcoming lesson" (Yang et al., 2021).
Based on pure intuition (not backed up by research), pretesting can help students focus on the most essential contents of the course during lectures. In situations where lecture contents are not "streamlined" (i.e., contain unnecessary details - and this is often the case), pretesting can have an even more substantial effect.
An interesting question is whether a fourth group with both pretest and post-test can significantly outperform any other group. I feel the combined technique would at least be as effective as either pretest or post-test alone.
Since I have a student with learning difficulties, I must design my teaching before any further research results emerge. I would combine pretests and post-tests this way:
1. Ask questions relating to the main structures of the course content in pretests, such as "What is a derivative" in a calculus course.
2. Cover the answers to the pretests in lectures.
3. Cover detailed explanations and scaffolded class exercises in lectures.
4. Ask exam-like questions in post-tests.
I hope this strategy, combined with spaced learning and interleaving, can help my student overcome his learning challenges.
I have successfully helped him once to improve his IELTS band score from 5.5 to 7.0 within 4 weeks, and I hope to successfully help him this time too!
While attention-guiding cues can lower the cognitive load by helping students focus on fewer contents, it is interesting that social cues alone cannot improve learning much. I initially thought that social cues provided by pedagogical agents might work since " teaching presence and social presence explain 69% of the variance in cognitive presence" in the Community of Inquiry model (Cleveland-Innes & Wilton, 2018, p. 14). However, according to the experiment in this study, they did not have such a strong effect on learning improvement.
I constantly feel that learning is a complex process involving cognitive processes, teaching and learning techniques, curriculum design and pedagogy, educational psychology, and much more. The settings in experiments can differ from online class situations. For example, participants in this study may perform differently since they knew they were participating in a one-time learning experiment without any consequences. In a real online class, they may have repeated involvement with the instructor and may have a high stake in their performance. As such, the motivation and behaviors can change, further affecting the course's efficacy.
I often feel that designing experiments to find answers in real-life situations is fun yet challenging. I will need further education to develop knowledge and skills to find answers.
Reference
Cleveland-Innes & Wilton (2018) Chapter 2: Theories Supporting Blended Learning, pages 9 -19 (no need to address the reflection questions in this resource), to learn about the CoI perspective as it relates to blended learning. Available at http://oasis.col.org/handle/11599/3095
Re: the pre-questioning effect
I am reminded of a pre-research strategy writers are encouraged to use before they write an essay (or, well, anything at all). Just generate hundreds of questions about the topic/thesis you are working on. Never mind if the answer to many of them is: "I don't know." In fact, the more "I don't knows" you have the better, for those questions are the ones that will lead you in new directions, towards a new synthesis of what you already know with what you will find out in the process of research.
One might liken this to preparing a net before casting it, I suppose.
Pre-questioning in classes or other learning situations would similarly prime the learning mind, alerting it to what it knows and does not know about a subject, perhaps even making it eager to find out those answers (for the mind detests vacuum, or a gap in the gestalt).
I'm sure this strategy would also work for self-learners, and becomes important in this age of the autodidact.
Being Indian, I think of this age as the age of Eklavya. With just an image of his supposed guru in front of him, Eklavya mastered archery. This happened, I am sure, through internal dialogues he conducted, with the guru of his imagination answering the questions he posed, and by trial and error and correction of what he learnt thus -- all by himself.
I think that's a powerful idea for self-learning, and all learning. I speak of both Eklavya's method, and of the pre-questioning strategy, though I know that, in ad libbing this comment, I may not have conveyed the degree of overlap between the two all too well. :-(