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.…

Instructors' attention to students is vital for teaching. However, instructors' level of attention to students, which has the potential to influence students' learning across different lecture types, has yet to be fully explored. The aim of this study was to examine the impacts of the instructor's attention to students and lecture type on…

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of virtual reality (VR) application on creative performance and immersion, evaluated through electroencephalography brain wave data to achieve accurate and robust results. In this study, 72 middle school teachers were recruited as participants, and a non-randomized control-group…

The coronavirus pandemic has forced the world to change education policies in educational institutions. For example, Jordan's Ministry of Higher Education has allowed courses in academic programs to be taught in three types of education: distance e-learning, blended education, and traditional education. Hence this study came to reveal students'…

The utilization of new technologies in teaching and learning is always one of the main concerns of the educational system. The increasing development of technology has caused comprehensive changes, especially in education. In this regard, Augmented Reality (AR) is one of these important educational technologies. AR creates an interaction between…

Generating written explanations is a popular learning strategy in an online learning environment. Students can explain to themselves (ie, self-explanations) or a peer-student (ie, instructional explanations). However, for improving learning from video lectures, it is unclear whether writing self-explanations is more beneficial than writing…

Previous studies have shown that encouraging students to use self-explanation strategies has proven effective in text-focused learning contexts. However, no study to date has focused on how students' strategy preference moderates the effect of self-explanation strategies on learning from video lectures. The current study investigated how students'…

Use of online video lectures is increasingly common. However, students may struggle to self-regulate their attention and passively process the content. This study examined whether, and for whom, different types of embedded learning prompts improve student learning from video lectures. Undergraduate physics students (N = 253) watched an online,…

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…

The instructor's eye gaze can serve as an important social cue in video lectures. The current study used two sets of three-level meta-analyses to explore the effects of the instructor's guided gaze or the instructor's direct gaze on learning outcomes, fixation time, perception of parasocial interaction, and cognitive load. A total of eight…

Background: Video lectures which include the instructor's presence are becoming increasingly popular. Presenting a real human does, however, entail higher financial and time costs in making videos, and one innovative approach to reduce costs has been to generate a virtual speaking instructor. Objectives: The current study examined whether the use…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, video materials have played crucial roles in supporting learning among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study aimed to explore the effects of the instructor's facial expressions in video lectures on attention and motor learning in children with ASD versus typically developing (TD) children. A total…

This study tested the interaction effect of the instructor's eye gaze (direct gaze vs. averted gaze) and facial expression (happy face vs. neutral face) on students' attention and learning performance in slide-based video lectures. University students (N = 120) participated in the experiment in a laboratory setting. The results of ANOVAs showed…

Retention of students' attention in general chemistry courses stands as one of the main challenges that educators are facing in classes of any size and is especially prevalent with classes composed of mixed majors. Herein, we describe our experience with introducing short, 10 min student lectures ("flash talks") on popular chemistry…

Background: Little is known about the effectiveness of instructors when presenting content in videos alone. In recent years, researchers have increasingly begun to explore the effects of instructors' social cues (e.g., eye gaze, body orientation, etc.) on learning. However, previous studies exploring the effects of eye gaze have confounded the…