online Christopher Durso Quiz Show

New research suggests an easy way to help participants get the most out of your online learning programs: Give them short, regular tests.

W

ith great freedom comes great invisibility — especially when it comes to online

education programs, which leave the pace and degree of learning entirely up to the user, with no guarantee to the instructor that anyone is actually pay- ing attention, let alone absorbing the information that’s being presented. But that could change, thanks to

a recent study by a team of Harvard University researchers that suggests a simple way to help people process and retain online content: quizzes. The researchers found that students who completed a short test every five min- utes during a 21-minute video lecture had an observably better learning expe- rience than students who weren’t tested.

“Taken together,” the researchers write, “the present results demonstrate ... test- ing can help students to quickly and efficiently extract lecture content by reducing the occurrence of mind wan- dering, increasing the frequency of note taking, and facilitating learning.” Published in the journal PNAS

(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America), the study specifically looked at online learning in a classroom set- ting, but according to lead author Karl Szupnar, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at Harvard, the findings are potentially applicable to any sort of education delivered remotely — including professional-development coursework. “When you get into the world of online learning,” Szupnar said, “it’s really up to the student to stay focused.” Why does testing help alleviate that?

For a few reasons. In most courses, tests are infrequent — usually administered

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just once or twice during a course. “Stu- dents think, ‘I’m not responsible for this for another month. If I don’t pay attention, I can get to it later,’” Szupnar said. “But if you put people on the hook and make them responsible for it every little while, they actually start paying more attention.” Plus, students themselves seem to

prefer it. “At the end of the lectures,” Szupnar, “students said [being tested every five minutes] was easier than not having been tested in terms of how easy it was to get through the class.” Probably that has something to do

with the students being more actively involved in the mechanics of retention

— a process that cognitive psychologists have been studying for the last 10 years, Szupnar said. “When you ask students how they study,” he said, “they always say they read through the information, then they read it again and they read it again. I assume that’s how it works with online videos.” Retrieving information, on the other

hand, “is a much better study strategy than reading over or reviewing some- thing,” he said. “When you’re retrieving it, you’re engaging the same mental processes that you’re going to use later when you retrieve it [during a final exam, for example]…. If you’ve practiced retrieving it, you’re going to be much better off in the future. Even with online videos, if you have people retrieve infor- mation right after the lecture, that’s better than nothing. It’s probably better to do it throughout the video, but any practice in retrieving information is going to help you in the long run.”

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Christopher Durso is executive editor of Convene.

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What’s Next? This is just the beginning for Karl Szupnar and his colleagues, who plan to continue studying best practices for online learning as Harvard wades deeper into the pool of MOOCs (massive open online courses) and other remote education programs. “This whole idea of making courses available across the world — MOOCs — that’s something that’s very new to us here at Harvard and a lot of other institutions of higher learn- ing,” Szupnar said. “I think ev- eryone’s jumping in, but it’s also something that not too many people have done yet, and those that are doing, there’s not too much research showing what’s the best way to approach this.”

ON THE WEB

Learn more about the study discussed in this article at convn.org/pnas-study.

ILLUSTRATION BY BECI ORPIN / THE JACKY WINTER GROUP