Students' judgments of their own learning are often misled by perceptions of fluency-the ease with which information is presented during learning. Lectures represent important learning experiences that contain variations in fluency, but have not been extensively studied. In the current study, students watched a 22-min videotaped lecture that was delivered by the same instructor in either a fluent (strong, confident, and deliberate) manner, or in a disfluent (uncertain, hesitant, and disengaged) manner. Students then predicted their score on an upcoming test on the information, rated the instructor on traditional evaluation measures, and took a multiple-choice test on the information immediately (Experiment 1), after 10 min (Experiment 2), or after 1 day (Experiment 3). The fluent instructor was rated significantly higher than the disfluent instructor, but test scores did not consistently differ between the 2 conditions. Though students did not indicate higher confidence overall in learning from a fluent instructor, Experiment 3 found that when participants base their confidence on the instructor, those in the fluent condition were more likely to be overconfident. These findings indicate that instructor fluency leads to higher ratings of instructors and can lead to higher confidence, but it does not necessarily lead to better learning. (PsycINFO Database Record

Studies have shown that prequestions-asking students questions before they learn something-benefit memory retention. Prequestions would seem to be a useful technique for enhancing students' learning in their courses, but classroom investigations of prequestions have been sparse. In the current study, students from an introductory psychology course were randomly assigned to receive prequestions over each upcoming lesson (prequestion group) or to not receive prequestions (control group). At the end of class, students in the prequestion group remembered the material better than students in the control group, but this benefit was specific to the information that was asked about in the prequestions. When memory for other, nonprequestioned portions of the lesson were tested at the end of class, the prequestion group performed similarly to the control group. On a follow-up quiz 1 week later, both groups showed a memory advantage for material that was tested at the end of class 1 week prior, compared with information from the same lesson that was never tested. However, this benefit was comparable between the prequestion group and the control group, suggesting that students benefit from retrieval practice, but prequestions add little, if any, enhancement to this effect. (PsycINFO Database Record

This study was designed to measure students’ voluntary use of retrieval practice as a review tool. Students who used test-based reviews scored higher on exams than students who used reading-based reviews. Showing students exam performance associated with test- vs. reading-based reviews coincided with a significant increase in use of test-based reviews.

Answering questions before a learning episode—“prequestions”—can enhance memory for that information. A number of studies have explored this effect in the laboratory; however, few studies have examined prequestions in a classroom setting. In the current study, the effects of prequestions were examined in an undergraduate course in chemical engineering. At the start of several class meetings, students were provided with a prequestion to answer about the upcoming lesson, and then were asked to provide ratings of confidence in their answers, familiarity with the content in the prequestion, and how much of the assigned reading they had completed. At the end of class, students were given the same question again (postquestion), along with a different question from the same lesson (new question). On a quiz at the end of each week, students were given the postquestions and new questions again, in addition to never-before-seen questions (quiz-only questions) from the same lessons. Performance on questions at the end of class revealed no difference in performance for postquestions vs. new questions. Although weekly quiz performance revealed an effect of retrieval practice—superior memory for material tested at the end of class (postquestions and new questions) compared to material not tested (quiz-only questions)—there was no difference in weekly quiz performance on postquestions vs. new questions. These results suggest that retrieval practice is beneficial to learning in the classroom. However, prequestions do not appear to enhance learning, nor to enhance the effects of retrieval practice.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s41235-017-0078-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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