Logic would suggest that lecturing to students in a clear, fluid style while making frequent eye contact would engage students and aid in their learning. At the very least, many people would assume, that technique would be more effective than hunching over a podium, reading from notes, and barely pausing to look up.
But that may not always be the case, according to a study published last month in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
Students who watched a lecture delivered in the clear and fluid style, which is described in a report on the study as “fluent,” were about twice as likely as those who watched the haltingly delivered, “disfluent” one to believe that they would remember the material they had just learned.
But both groups actually remembered about the same amount, with the students who had watched the disfluent lecture more accurately predicting how well they recalled the material.
“What students perceive as very effective is not always as effective as they think it is,” said Shana K. Carpenter, an assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University, and lead author of the study, “Appearances Can Be Deceiving,” which is subtitled “instructor fluency increases perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning.”
Lecturer as Catalyst
Ms. Carpenter and her fellow researchers conducted two experiments to arrive at their findings. In the first, 42 undergraduates in an introductory psychology course at Iowa State were randomly assigned to two groups. Each was told their memory would be tested later. They watched a 65-second video of a lecturer explaining why calico cats are usually female. Participants who had extensive prior knowledge of the subject were removed from the study.
One group watched the fluent video, in which the speaker stood in front of a desk, spoke without notes, maintained eye contact with the camera, and gestured with her hands for emphasis.
The other students watched the disfluent one. The same lecturer stood behind a desk and delivered identical content, but read haltingly from notes as she hunched over a podium, pausing occasionally to glance at the camera.
After watching the videos, the students in both groups were asked how well they thought they had learned the material, how much they predicted they would remember 10 minutes later, and how organized, effective, and knowledgeable the speaker was.
Both groups spent about 10 minutes answering 30 trivia questions on unrelated topics. Then they had five minutes to explain, in writing, why calico cats are female.
The students who had watched the fluent lecture were about twice as likely as those who had watched the disfluent one to predict that they would remember what they had heard and to say they had learned the material. The fluent speaker was also rated as significantly more organized, knowledgeable, and effective than the disfluent speaker.
The scores on the test, however, revealed that the students who had viewed the fluent speaker were overconfident: Students in the two groups performed equally well on the test, getting about 25 percent of the material correct.
“What is clear,” Ms. Carpenter and her fellow authors wrote, “is that a more-fluent instructor may increase perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning.”
The implication, they continued, is that students may conflate how well their instructor seems to know the material with how well they themselves do. “The question students should ask themselves is not whether it seemed clear when someone else explained it,” they wrote. “The question is, ‘Can I explain it clearly?’”
‘Troubling Implications’
In the second experiment, 70 other students were divided into two groups, shown the same video lectures, given the same trivia questions, and asked to explain the reasons that calico cats are female. But this time, after the lectures, the students could read a one-page script of the speaker’s remarks, and could take as much time as they wished.
The two groups of students in the second experiment spent about the same amount of time, approximately one and a half minutes, reading the script, and they scored about the same on the test.
Another wrinkle emerged. If the students who had watched the disfluent lecture chose to spend a longer-than-average time reading the script, their scores improved, while the same could not be said of students who had read the script after watching the fluent one.
“To be honest, we’re not really sure what that means,” Ms. Carpenter said. It could be, she added, that the students who watched the less-engaging lecture had read the script more attentively. “They’re approaching it from a more-realistic perception perhaps,” she said.
The study’s results comport with a growing body of literature on the disconnection between what people think they have learned and what they actually did learn, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, an associate professor of marketing and psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles, said in an e-mail.
Intuition is not always accurate, added Mr. Oppenheimer, who has studied fluency and memory. “This has troubling implications for the usefulness of teaching evaluations and other common measures of teaching and course quality.”
Ms. Carpenter cautioned that her results should not be interpreted to mean that lecture style is unimportant, or that bad lectures are acceptable. Instructors who teach in a fluent manner may also be more likely to organize their classes well and be attentive to students’ questions, which would help students learn.
“I’d like to think,” she said, “that there are things that instructors do that influence learning.”
