Learning-by-teaching is a generative learning activity in which learners explain the material in a lesson to others after studying it.  Wang and colleagues conducted an experiment with 96 college students from a university in central China to compare three versions of learning-by-teaching, all without audience interaction but with varied levels of social presence, thereby leading to different levels of extraneous processing, which causes learners to engage in cognitive processing irrelevant to the instruction purpose (e.g., distraction). Participants studied a 2-minute video on chemical synaptic transmission for 9 minutes and prepared a brief lesson of less than 5 minutes under a randomly assigned one of three conditions: (1) teach-to-camera – teach to an imaginary audience by creating a video lecture; (2) teach-to-student – teach to an audience face-to-face; (3) teach-to-group – teach to seven people physically present in the room. Audiences in the latter two conditions provided no feedback. Data collecting involved learning outcomes scores, self-reported questionnaires, pulse rate, and teaching process recordings.  Results indicated that:

• Students in the teach-to-camera condition performed better than those in the other two conditions in terms of generative processing, (more idea units, elaborations, and monitoring statements in their explanation).
• The teach-to-camera condition participants outperformed those in the teach-to-group condition in the retention test and the transfer test, and they scored better than those in the teach-to-student condition on the retention test.
• The teach-to-camera condition participants also reported significantly lower social presence and pulse rate than the two other groups, and perceived lower state anxiety, teaching difficulty, and cognitive load in teaching than those in the teach-to-group condition.

The authors suggested that the better performance in learning-by-teaching resulting from teaching to a camera may be due to the absence of an audience which led to less social presence and in turn served to reduce extraneous processing or distraction (anxiety, cognitive load in teaching, pulse rate) and to enhance generative processing.

Source: Wang, F., Cheng, M., & Mayer, R. E. (2023, May 25). Improving learning-by-teaching without audience interaction as a generative learning activity by minimizing the social presence of the audience. Journal of Educational Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000801