All rhetorics experts will tell you that facing your audience is to prefer to staring into the blackboard or projector screen while lecturing. This advice also appears intuitively right; it simply ”feels nicer” to address ones listeners in a way that acknowledges the fact that you’re in the same room. Having eye contact during an ordinary conversation is a natural part of human social interaction. However, the primary goal of a university lecture is normally not to establish a social relationship between lecturer and students, but to induce learning. Hence, an obvious question of interest is: do lecturers’ bodily orientation and tendency to eye contact have any measurable impact on students’ learning performance? Yes! according to a recent empirical study, relevant for everyone who is considering producing video recorded lectures, and probably everyone giving ordinary lectures, too!
In a paper by Beege et al, titled Look into my eyes! Exploring the effect of addressing in educational videos, the authors seek to extend research on so-called parasocial interaction (widely studied in the context of computer games) to the field of learning. In the experiment, the authors randomly subjected individual students (88 participants in total) to one of four video recorded versions of the same 10 min. lecture on statistics, varying the two parameters proximity (near — far) and orientation (frontal — lateral) of the camera’s position relative the lecturer. In this context, near means at a distance of 1.5 m, and far at a distance of 10 m. Similarly, frontal implies right in front of the lecturer, while lateral is to be understood as filming from an angle of 40°. After having seen the lecture, the students were made to answer questions related to both the social experience of watching the video (e.g., to what extent the lecturer seemed to actually address the student), and the understanding of the lecture content (testing simple retention of knowledge as well as transfer skills — the ability to apply the subject content to problem solving).
The authors registered no impact regarding the proximity of the camera — neither on the experience of subjective addressing, nor on learning outcomes. The orientation, on the other hand, did have a significant effect on both the perception of addressing and the retention of facts: students watching either of the two frontal versions of the lecture scored higher on the retention test. No such effect was detected on the transfer questions, however, which the authors suggest could be due to the short lecture time, given that it offers very little opportunity for deeper learning. (Obviously, a similar but more long term study would be needed to support this assumption.) To summarize, the study suggests a couple of rules of thumb for the production of video recorded lectures: don’t worry too much about how far away the camera is, but make sure to place it in front of you.
Comment: Studies like this remind us not to underestimate the small details when it comes to students’ learning and sense of belonging. Obviously, countless of tiny adjustments to teaching could have measurable impacts; does it matter, e.g., whether a small image of the face is inserted in the lower corner of an online Powerpoint presentation, or whether we smile or not during a lecture? Plenty of food for thought, as well as ideas for future research!
Text: Emma Wikberg, Physics
