Watching A Lecture Twice At Double Speed Can Benefit Learning Better Than Watching It Once At Normal Speed (bps.org.uk) 70
The British Psychological Society: Watching lecture videos is now a major part of many students' university experience. Some say they prefer them to live lectures, as they can choose when to study. And, according to a survey of students at the University of California Los Angeles, at least, many students also take advantage of the fact that video playback can be sped up, so cutting the amount of time they spend on lectures. But what impact does sped-up viewing have on learning? The answer, according to a new paper in Applied Cognitive Psychology, is, within some limits, none. In fact, if used strategically, it can actually improve learning. However, what students think is going to be the best strategy isn't actually what's most beneficial, Dillon Murphy at UCLA and colleagues also report. First, the team assigned 231 student participants to watch two YouTube videos (one on real estate appraisals and the other on the Roman Empire) at normal speed, 1.5x speed, 2x speed or 2.5x speed. They were told to watch the videos in full screen mode and not to pause them or take any notes. After each video, the students took comprehension tests, which were repeated a week later. The results were clear: the 1.5x and 2x groups did just as well on the tests as those who'd watched the videos at normal speed, both immediately afterwards and one week on. Only at 2.5x was learning impaired.
When the team surveyed a separate group of UCLA students, they found that a massive 85% usually watched pre-recorded lectures at faster than normal speed. However, 91% said they thought that normal speed or slightly faster (1.5x) would be better for learning than 2x or 2.5x. These new results certainly suggest that this isn't right: double-time viewing was just as good as normal viewing. It seems, then, that as long as the material can still be accurately perceived and comprehended, it's okay to speed up playback. So, a student could just watch videos at 2x speed and halve their time spent on lectures...Or, according to the results of other studies reported in the paper, they could watch a video at 2x normal speed twice, and do better on a test than if they'd watched it once at normal speed. The timing mattered, though: only those who'd watched the 2x video for a second time immediately before a test, rather than right after the first viewing, got this advantage.
When the team surveyed a separate group of UCLA students, they found that a massive 85% usually watched pre-recorded lectures at faster than normal speed. However, 91% said they thought that normal speed or slightly faster (1.5x) would be better for learning than 2x or 2.5x. These new results certainly suggest that this isn't right: double-time viewing was just as good as normal viewing. It seems, then, that as long as the material can still be accurately perceived and comprehended, it's okay to speed up playback. So, a student could just watch videos at 2x speed and halve their time spent on lectures...Or, according to the results of other studies reported in the paper, they could watch a video at 2x normal speed twice, and do better on a test than if they'd watched it once at normal speed. The timing mattered, though: only those who'd watched the 2x video for a second time immediately before a test, rather than right after the first viewing, got this advantage.
Misleading headline is misleading (Score:5, Informative)
The truly relevant portion is the last sentence from TFS:
Of course people who revisit the material IMMEDIATELY BEFORE BEING TESTED ON IT will remember it better...
This qualifies as journalism these days.
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Busted !
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The guy who programs the regex comment filter has been tricked 847 consecutive times by the exact same pattern... just this month.
It must warm their heart to know they've been continually outsmarted by people who post ASCII swastikas.
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Maybe it's just a festive time of year, but I see Rudolph with a naked chick.
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eh, it's cat and mouse; anything blocked gets worked around.
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Yeah, that seems like a pretty big difference. One hopes, but does not expect, that the study also reported on the performance of students who watched the video once, at normal speed, just before the test.
One would also hope for numbers on people watching the lecture and taking notes, but maybe that is too old-fashioned an approach to learning. Most of my lectures during school were paced for the students to be able to take notes, rather than for strictly listening, and doubling the speed of the lecture w
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This qualifies as journalism these days.
and science. it is pretty obvious that this is totally dependent on the content, how complex it is, how much detail it has, how fast the speaker is, etc. so, what they have actually found out is that as long as information is given you at a pace at which you can still register it, you will remember it. who would have thought. brilliant genius.
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This qualifies as journalism these days.
and science. it is pretty obvious that this is totally dependent on the content, how complex it is, how much detail it has, how fast the speaker is, etc. so, what they have actually found out is that as long as information is given you at a pace at which you can still register it, you will remember it. who would have thought. brilliant genius.
Eh, the paper is a little more on point. To the fact that the abstract even says the opposite of the misleading headline:
(emphasis mine) so I'd argue that the science, while somewhat trivial, is more accurate than the journalism.
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The truly relevant portion is the last sentence from TFS:
Of course people who revisit the material IMMEDIATELY BEFORE BEING TESTED ON IT will remember it better...
This qualifies as journalism these days.
It's difficult to gain access to the paper as it's behind a paywall, but if you can access it you can see that you have dismissed the nuance. The key is that the study found that students can watch the material twice at 2x, and if the second 2x session occurs shortly before a test on the material the students do better. Which is basically what you stated, Now here is the nuance: 1: The researchers clearly stated that expected improvement with this method. 2: Most of the students self-reported not listening
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Which is basically what you stated, Now here is the nuance: 1: The researchers clearly stated that expected improvement with this method. 2: Most of the students self-reported not listening to lectures at 2x speed.
Interesting. Neither of those points are in the abstract. In fact, the abstract flat out states that the 2x speed right before the test was being done.
That hypothesis that you indicate in nuance 1 is unsurprising though.
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In a world of ubiquitous ADD (Score:3)
Playing a lecture at normal speed means most students lose interest half-way through.
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A lecture is designed for a class of 10+ people. It is designed to teach the mean population of the class its material. So for half the students the material is too slow, and for the other half it is too fast. The half of the populations can often switch from topic to topic.
When it is too slow, people will tune out of the lecture, and often miss vital points of new material, that is happening in what feels like a repetitive drudge.
While the parts that are too fast, are moving to a different topic before y
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Most people speak very slowly and many voice artifacts are not useful in learning. There are only a few things I listen to at 2x (many more that I watch without sound at 2x), but there are some great minds that are painful to listen to at anything less than 1.5x.
I would chalk it up less to ADD and more to speech cadence.
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I agree. A lot depends on the individual speaker. I watch to a lot of content on Youtube and I appreciate the ability to speed up and slow down the playback speed on the fly using the less-than and greater-than keys (shift-comma and shift-period).
Most of the time I start watching the videos at 1.25x but perhaps that's just the caffeine.
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Nothing is lost at 2x speed (Score:5, Interesting)
Most lectures contain a lot of fluff and unnecessary words. It's hard, after all, to be concise and to the point. As Blaise Pascal said, “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” https://intenseminimalism.com/... [intenseminimalism.com]
In most lectures, you could listen to about 5 minutes of a one-hour lecture (if you could identify the right 5 minutes) and get everything you need to know.
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Part of the issue is the goal.
Go teach them something for 1 hour vs. go teach them what they need to know in this lecture, then let them leave early to work on the assignment.
They are inclined to draw things out.
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Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It really depends how difficult the material in the lecture is.
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The old speed reading technique was to skim first and then read the content that was needed to complete a task. That is counterproductive for learning, but similar techniques work quite effectively for lectures— 2x for as much as you can, assess what you did not understand, and go back at 1.5x for the parts you require additional exposure to.
(I wish I had that flexibility on my matrix and linear algebra class I think that was the hardest one I ever had and while I did ok on the tests I never really u
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I would argue that it's not about how difficult the material is, but more about how capable the lecturer is.
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The problem is each student will need a different 5 minute section of the lecture to get the idea.
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Most lectures contain a lot of fluff and unnecessary words. It's hard, after all, to be concise and to the point. As Blaise Pascal said, “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” https://intenseminimalism.com/... [intenseminimalism.com]
In most lectures, you could listen to about 5 minutes of a one-hour lecture (if you could identify the right 5 minutes) and get everything you need to know.
It depends on what's being communicated.
For something like Real Estate appraisals or the Roman Empire a lot of what's being communicated is the tone and relative importance of different factors. So all that fluff and unnecessary words probably does have an important role in providing context.
For other subjects like math I'd be curious to see the results. I don't think you could speed up learning by speeding up the lecture, but I also think you don't learn from the lecture directly, but rather, you learn fro
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I would argue that it has less to do with the subject at hand, and more to do with the skill of the lecturer. I had an accounting professor in college who took that dry subject and turned it into a fascinating, intense journey through the workings of finance. Other professors just drone on and on to fill the time allotted, covering the bullet points of their outline.
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I question whether that assertion (or the result of this study) would hold up if the goal is to develop expertise long-term.
Learning things is not just a function of whether you have ever been exposed to a piece of information, but whether it you focused on it long enough and often enough to remember it.
Somebody who read Lord of the Rings 10 years
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You hit on a very important point with your Lord of the Rings example. It's not the information being communicated, it's the emotional impact of the impression on the learner. Students don't really learn from lectures. The lectures are a piece of the puzzle. But in the end, students have to put in the effort to learn, regardless of the lecture.
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To me, the lecture was a waste of time. I already read the material and understood it. They were there for questions if any. Yet they required us to be there. Once in a while, they'd offer an interdisciplinary course. I loved those because I could knock those courses out in a couple of weeks and get an A.
Psychology belongs in the religion section (Score:1)
Psychology experiments are not reproduced, it is not a science, just a set of dubious well-publicised and often dangerous beliefs based solely on the bias of those doing the "experiments".
Re: Psychology belongs in the religion section (Score:2)
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Science would include citations. This is a meaningless rant.
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It is if you are smart enough to understand Statistics,
Look we performed this same test over and over, we chart out the results in a histogram, and we find it fits a Normal distribution curve. Perhaps it is showing some useful connection to the hypothesis. Now you change a parameter, you still get a normal distribution but the mean is shifted. Correlation between the variable and the results.
Now lets use some more statistics to drive on the possible cause of that correlation, with more studies and test.
Eve
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Rote learning (Score:3)
Chipmunks (Score:2)
Another factor which the article doesn't seem to address is that of foreign language comprehension. Does this speed-up only work if the lecture is in your mother tongue? My wife, who speaks excellen
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I watch youtube "how to" videos at 2x and usually miss nothing but that is because the narrators are verbose and repetitive.
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In one of the video's, the speaker was really slow. At 1.5x he sounded normal.
Tech is great.
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Re:Chipmunks (Score:5, Informative)
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I used to listen to Monty Python, etc. tapes at 2x 'dubbing' speed.
Twice the jokes per minute AND silly voices.
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Most modern video speed controls do pitch correction. This is probably an inherent side-effect of audio compression being in the frequency domain after a Fourier transform. Music can really get upbeat, though.
Seriously, have you never used the speed-up in Youtube? I watch most stuff at 1.25x these days, and on my DVR (which goes by 0.05) steps, I watch Jeopardy episodes at 1.35x.
How far can we push this? 4x? 8x? (Score:3, Funny)
Network 23 could get into educational programming.
It's worth noting... (Score:4, Insightful)
Learning doesn't really take place in lectures. Lectures are where you find the important questions, but they're actually fairly poor at delivering information. Online learning offers no meaningful benefit there. Most learning takes place through doing, not listening. This is why taking notes is important (it's repetition and that does help with learning) but practical application of that knowledge is how it really gets in.
This is part of why speeding up the videos makes no difference. Lectures are about finding out what questions to ask and where/how to look for answers, rather than learning.
Lectures and classes would be a lot shorter and a lot more useful if this was understood. Instead of changing the technology, increase the ratio of doing to listening.
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good luck telling the kiddies that one; they think grades are the only metric that matters. You try making them actually LEARN and about half complain that you are not teaching them; just giving them homework to do; not lecturing how to do the homework, etc. Or they complain the class was useless because it didn't prepare them enough to make their job as easy as they expected.
They've had it so bad, they don't have a clue what an education is!
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I have had two great lecturers in school— one for high school history and one for three semesters of architectural history. The lectures were painfully information dense, but were quite effective. Both lecturers required massive amounts of study outside of class, but that was to grasp and reinforce the information they presented. (The architectural history teacher ran four slide carousels for a one hour class— something like 10 seconds average per slide, all of which were relevant.)
I have had
What about math or engineering lectures? (Score:1)
I doubt that watching a math lecture will still be easy to understand when sped up. Explanations of complex mathematical concepts need time to process, and usually each word spoken has important implications, you cannot put them on fast forward. This also goes for engineering lectures, including software engineering. If you miss some words because of the speed, you start lagging behind, and then stop understanding it altogether.
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Having sat through thousands of these, my take is that it is much like being in the Army: periods of utter boredom punctuated by moments of panic. While the guy is talking, speed it up. When the point is made, stop it, and think about it. In addition, you won't really understand it until you do the problem sets.
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Much of it comes down to the course structure and teaching styles. For some teachers the lecture is more about reinforcing material that you were supposed to read the night before; others might have the opposite style, giving you a quick window into the information you are about to read about. Others solve problems in class.
Videos in general give you a chance to replay your Ah-Ha moment, but going through the lecture quickly gives you a chance to orient yourself to the content.
not surprising (Score:2)
This is not surprising. It's been known for decades that comprehension increases with greater speed of delivery. Up to a point, of course.
Speeding up helps me (Score:2)
I've found it easier to stay focused on video lectures when they're sped up. At 1.0x, my brain has enough processing power left over that I start to think about other things, try to do other things in parallel etc. At 1.5x I have to pay close attention so I'm focused entirely on the lecture.
(depending on the speaker of course. More hemming and hawing=speed up, complex subject matter in other language = speed down)
I've also noticed this when driving. At 80 km/h I have trouble staying alert. At 130 km/h it's
Psych 101 (Score:2)
DoublePlus Good, what!
yeah, but what about math or physics lectures? (Score:1)
real estate appraisal or the roman empire sounds like there's not going to be a lot of complex information to retain -- just a few simple pieces of information. if it was a math lecture or a physics lecture - which requires deep attention and active, slow, careful spatial / formal operational reasoning, i'm sure the results would be very different. On that note - maybe they should compare lectures that require formal operational reasoning with lectures that only require concrete operational reasoning.
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Only to the ignorant. "The inventions and innovations which were generated by the Roman Empire profoundly altered the lives of the ancient people and continue to be used in cultures around the world today." [worldhistory.org]
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
if it requries no deep thought (Score:2)
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Sssslllllloooooowwwww (Score:2)
I've started watching YouTube videos on 1.5x or 1.75x speed, and it's been a game-changer. People just talk way too slow, and my brain gets bored with them.
When I watch the videos at 1.75x speed, everyone sounds more intelligent, and I find myself, hours later, far down the rabbit hole of YouTube content.
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Lectures are Passive (Score:2)
It can work (Score:2)
Editing or adaptive speed (Score:2)
Duh? (Score:2)
As a neurodivergent person who is highly visually oriented all I have to say is duh, wasn't this already very obvious? Annenberg Learner (https://www.learner.org) has been an indispensable resource for me for over well over a decade at this point.
The 2x speed on youtube... (Score:2)