Need for Speed

This morning I watched two pre-recorded webinars (on A.I. tools) at 1.5x speed. I did slow down to 1.25x speed at certain portions where I anticipated something I wanted to learn. Why did I speed up the videos? Often there’s dross and filler I am less interested in, so it feels efficient to let those pass by at a higher speed where presumably I don’t do as much cognitive work. I did pause the videos on a couple of occasions to write a note on something I should try out.

 

Post-pandemic, students sometimes ask if my lectures can be recorded (not by them, but by the “system” setup in the classroom). The purported reason for asking is so they can review the lecture again later. The answer thus far has been No. I strongly suspect that if I provided recorded lectures, attendance would drop. While attendance in my G-Chem classes is overall quite good (over 90% most days), the small number of students who consistently miss class on a regular basis do poorly in the course. (Attendance in P-Chem is usually close to 100%, and students fret if they miss class, because when it happens they very quickly realize they have fallen behind.)

 

And in the age of A.I., if I provide recorded lectures, I’m certain the students would watch it at accelerated speeds, and then ask A.I. to provide a written summary. This is unlikely to help their learning although it might give them the illusion of learning. But this isn’t to say that you cannot learn from videos. There are many examples where video is excellent at helping you learn how to do something that physically requires motor skills – if I need to make a minor repair or if I wanted to learn a new cooking technique. But does that extend to learning scientific concepts?

 

With a brief but lazy search, I came across “The effects of lecture speed and note-taking on memory and educational material” (Chen et al, Applied Cognitive Psychology 2024, DOI: 10.1002/acp.4166). Here’s the abstract which also summarizes the work, but the paper is worth reading in full. It’s a small study and thus its extensibility is less clear at the moment, but the results are interesting, and I hope there is further study in these areas. The pre-recorded video materials were on the Paleozoic Era and Microeconomics, and there was a post-test. Interestingly, watching at 2x speed results in a small drop in test results. Taking notes helped.

 

I’m not going to discuss the article details as I’m unlikely to implement video recordings of my classes, but it made me think about the speed of my lectures. My course teaching evaluations have students regularly saying that I go fast. This is true and there are reasons behind it. I won’t hash those out here, but I will say that I tell students how to approach my classes and that pre-reading before class is important to getting the most out of class in-person. While I do pause my speech when I observe the majority of the students writing furiously what I have written on the board, it’s possible I need to provide longer pauses so they can digest the material. The natural punctuating rhythm of in-class student questions helps in this regard. What I don’t know is the quality of the student notes, whether they are taking notes while cognitively engaging the material or just passively copying stuff down. I can’t peer into their minds. For the students who come to drop-in (office) hours, I do get to see the quality of their notes, however this is a small subset and it’s usually the stronger students who stop by. I have had limited success getting the students who need the most help to visit my office and ask me questions.

 

One positive aspect of the speed in my classes is that practically no students are on their phone or surfing the web if they use a tablet to take notes (hardly anyone uses a laptop to take notes during class). The pace means there is less time and opportunity to be distracted, at least visibly so. I can’t peer into their minds so there might be passive, mechanical, note-taking with the mind wandering elsewhere. Students look like they are paying attention, and the lecture classes are interactive. When I break students into groups to work on something and walk around, students do work on my assigned questions, (because they might randomly be called to answer to the whole class) and the time is tightly controlled – they have to work relatively quickly and productively.

 

Actually, knowing the material and learning it well results in a fluency when it comes to taking exams. Thus, my exams are written with time being relatively tight. The strongest students will finish with time to spare; the weakest students will also finish early because they simply didn’t know how to do a problem; but the majority of students might finish with barely time to spare. I’ve read the literature about the supposed “harm” of timed tests, and I’m overall not convinced by the arguments (although I have made modifications to my pedagogical approach after reading some reasonably raised points).

 

I suspect that short-form incessant video watching has changed the way the student today “consumes” information in my classes, certainly differently from the students I had in the previous generation when I started teaching at the university two dozen years ago. Extensive gen-A.I. use among students in the last couple of years has further changed things, possibly drastically. All this keeps my life as an educator interesting as I learn to adapt with the evolving technology that students use and consume. Acceleration, the need for speed, seems to be the new name of the ongoing game.