Effects of primer podcasts on stimulating learning from lectures: How do students engage?

Effects of primer podcasts on stimulating learning fromlectures: How do students engage?

Anguelina Popova, Paul A. Kirschner and Richard Joiner

Anguelina Popova is a PhD candidate at the Open Universiteit Nederland. Paul A. Kirschner is Professor of Educa-tional Psychology at the Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies (CELSTEC) at the Open Universiteit Ned-erland and Scientific Director of the Netherlands Laboratory for Lifelong Learning. Richard Joiner is Senior Lecturerand Director of Studies for the Psychology Undergraduate programme in the Department of Psychology at theUniversity of Bath, UK. Address for correspondence: Miss Anguelina Popova, CELSTEC, Open University of theNetherlands, Valkenburgerweg 177, Heerlen 6419 AT, The Netherlands. Email: [email protected]

AbstractA number of factors can influence learning from lectures such as students’ priorknowledge, their motivation, the instructional design, the lecturer and so forth. Instruc-tional aid techniques such as preparing class notes, giving quizzes (either planned orspot quizzes) and the like can be used to maximise learning. This study uses two well-documented tools for learning from text—advance organisers and higher order ques-tions—adapted for use with podcasts. Student evaluations of their experience of beingprimed for lectures with podcasts are described. The findings show that audio advanceorganisers and questions experienced by students have a positive influence on learning,because they help students bridge the conceptual distance between new and prior knowl-edge, better understand the topics in the lectures and stimulate thinking more deeplyabout the lecture’s content and the possible applications of the subject of the lecture.

IntroductionWell into the 21st century, lectures are still the dominant form of teaching in most institutions ofhigher learning. The exact benefit from a lecture is hard to predict. Some students prepare forthem, whereas others expect to “learn it all” from the instructor during the lecture. Some studentsalready have knowledge of the lecture topic, whereas others lack background knowledge andprofit poorly from the new information. Also, instructors use lectures for different reasons. Someuse them to rehash what was in the required readings, whereas others use them to broaden anddeepen the readings. All of this means that lectures are seldom as effective as they could be.

The constructivist view of learning emphasises the role of active cognitive processing in learners.A number of techniques can be used to enhance this learning from lectures. Mayer (2001, 2005)identifies three cognitive processes that enhance meaningful learning, namely selecting (ie, payingattention to incoming information), organising (ie, building a coherent cognitive representation)and integrating (ie, connecting new knowledge with prior knowledge). Ohlsson (1995) contendsthat for optimal learning, a learning design should be created around certain learning activitiesthat he calls epistemic tasks. These are tasks that are meant to stimulate the learner to describe,explain, predict, argue, critique, explicate and/or define. Learning is expected to be maximised asa result of organising knowledge and engaging students in these learning activities.

In the research described in this article, a cohort of undergraduate psychology studentswere exposed to pre-lecture (ie, primer) audio podcasts, throughout one semester. The purpose

British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 45 No 2 2014 330–339doi:10.1111/bjet.12023

© 2013 British Educational Research Association

of these primer podcasts was to provide students with common background information as wellas a scaffold on which to “hang” the information contained in the lecture. The podcasts invitedstudents to reflect on epistemic questions and answer them at the end of the lectures as a writtenreview activity. This article reports on students’ perceptions of whether and how such primerpodcasts and questions affected their learning from the lectures.

BackgroundPodcasts are quickly becoming widely used to disseminate audio and audio-visual information toa broad populace. Podcasts are digital media files with audio and/or audio and video (enhancedpodcasts if they integrate sound and still images; or video podcast, also known as vodcasts) thatare made available from a website, can be opened and/or downloaded and played on a computer,or downloaded from a website to be played on a small portable player designed to play soundand/or vision (Salmon & Edirisingha, 2008). Podcasts as a digital technology to distributeinstructional narratives have gained acceptance in education in general and in higher educationin particular. Lecture recordings are the most prevalent form of podcasts (eg, Copley, 2007;McKinney, Dyck & Luber, 2009), but their use as supplementary or additional materials inthe form of post-lecture summaries, interviews, discussions and reminders are also found (Baker,Harrison, Thornton & Yates, 2008; Carvalho, Aguiar, Carvalho & Cabecinhas, 2008). Student-generated podcasts have a special place in research, as they highly engage students in theirlearning, promote deep learning and reflection (Chan, Lee & McLoughlin, 2006).

Researchers report an overall positive impact of instructor-generated podcasts on learning,specifically in terms of affecting student motivation and engagement (Carle, Jaffee & Miller,2009; Edirisingha & Salmon, 2007), of enhancing better understanding of the material (Lee &Tynan, 2008), especially of conceptually challenging material (Aliotta, Bates, Brunton &Stevens, 2008), and of providing clear instructions (Anzai, 2007; Nie, Armellini, Randall,

Practitioners NotesWhat is already known about this topic

• Prior knowledge supports meaningful learning.• Advance organisers facilitate recall and provide a structure for meaningful learning.• Epistemic questions enhance higher order thinking.

What this paper adds

• Using primer podcasts as audio advance organisers can help students better under-stand new concepts.

• Asking epistemic questions in advance of lectures encourages deeper learning bystimulating prior knowledge activation and self-questioning.

• Primer podcasts were not used as stand alone instructional aid but rather in combi-nation with a review activity and feedback—a full-cycle epistemic activity.

Implications for practice/policy

• Explaining core concepts and providing structure before a lecture gives students anopportunity to make sense of what they learn.

• Podcasts can potentially free-up time for more in-depth discussion during lecture orengage students in more epistemic activities.

• Using audio material should be carefully considered in terms of multimedia learningtheory and cognitive load theory.

Effects of primer podcasts 331


Harrington & Barklamb, 2010) and feedback (France & Ribchester, 2008). Podcasts are alsoreported to positively affect students becoming better acquainted with the lecturer (Fernandez,Simo & Sallan, 2009; Taylor & Clark, 2010).

Generally, these reports about the effects of podcasts agree with findings in earlier research aboutusing audio for educational purposes in the 1980s. Research then showed that the spoken wordinfluences cognition through its clarity of instruction and that it enhances emotional aspects oflearning by conveying immediacy and a connection with the teacher (Durbridge, 1984; Power,1990). Kirschner, Van den Brink and Meester (1991), for example, found that audiotaped feed-back on an essay that students were required to write contained more information (approxi-mately twice as much information) cost the instructor approximately half the time to produce asopposed to written feedback and was perceived by students as being more informative, personaland friendly than written feedback. Very much the same is true about podcasts (Nie et al, 2010).

Podcasts, often recorded during an already planned and executed learning event (ie, lecturepodcasts) or after such a learning event (ie, as supplementary/additional materials), are princi-pally used by students to fill in gaps in what they have retained from their learning activities(eg, what they heard or should have heard in the lecture) or reinforce what they have retainedfrom those learning experiences (Copley, 2007; Fernandez et al, 2009). Very little research hasbeen conducted on using podcasts to prepare students for what is going to be taught and/or toaddress their misconceptions on the content before they actually attend lectures. One example ofsuch research is a study by Aliotta et al (2008), in which two podcasts, targeting difficult conceptsin elementary undergraduate physics, were presented to students a few days prior to their lec-tures. The study found a small yet consistent positive influence of listening to podcasts on studentscorrectly answering conceptual questions.

This study reports on another, though related, use of podcasts to help students better learn fromlectures. Podcast advance organisers with adjunct epistemic questions were used throughout asemester to provide students with a scaffold to support integrating knowledge from the lecturesand stimulate them to process the new information at a deeper level that is actually applying thenew information in new situations.

Advance organisers are instructional aid materials that provide ideational scaffolding (schematainto which more specific information could be integrated) at a higher level of generality, inclusive-ness and abstraction for incorporation and retention of more detailed, subsumptive and concretematerial that follows (Ausubel, 1968). A basic premise of the functioning of advance organisers isthe proper use of learner’s prior knowledge. Individuals often possess concept-relevant knowledgethat aids their understanding of new concepts, even for relatively unfamiliar content domains(Hannafin & Hooper, 1993). Specifically in psychology, Thompson and Zamboanga (2003) foundthat students often have considerable prior knowledge of psychological concepts gained fromschool, folk theories, media and everyday experience. If, however, this knowledge is incompleteor exaggerated, it could be detrimental to learning (Taylor & Kowalski, 2004; Van den Broek &Kendeou, 2008). Advance organisers serve the purpose of evoking prior knowledge on a giventopic and/or creation of a common background (ie, representation of a concept), on whichstudents can build further understanding of the content yet to come (eg, in a lecture). In this way,advance organisers are a tool for enhancing meaningful learning and have been found to positivelyaffect performance on recall and for far transfer tasks (Corkill, 1992; Mayer, 1979). In this study,they are also used as a base to launch higher order epistemic questions.

One of the major purposes of using questions as an instructional aid is to stimulate reflectionupon what is presented (eg, said by a teacher, presented in a textbook, etc.), to direct attentionto certain information and/or to support the production of new knowledge and ideas from thepresented information. Questions placed either prior to what is expected to be learned or directly

332 British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 45 No 2 2014


after are called adjunct questions (Rothkopf, 1966). Such questions are seen as being able to inducemathemagenic behaviours (literally, behaviours that give birth to learning; Rothkopf, 1970; seeHamaker [1986] for a review of research on adjunct questions). Recent research on question-prompting procedures shows that questions can induce and stimulate cognitive, metacognitive,motivational, volitional, cooperative and problem-solving activities during learning (Bannert,2009; Papadoupoulos, Demetriadis, Stamelos & Tsoukalas, 2009). Question prompts have alsobeen found to be effective in scaffolding higher order thinking (Demetriadis, Papadoupoulos,Stamelos & Fischer, 2008; Scardamalia, Bereiter, McLean, Swallow & Woodruff, 1989). The typeof questions used here aim to relate to the learner’s thinking process and to involve him/her incarrying out epistemic tasks (Ohlsson, 1995). Hence we called them adjunct epistemic questions.

In a constructivist learning environment, assessment should be integrated into the learningprocess and measure the qualitative expression of knowledge (eg, what the learner does with it orhow he/she manipulates concepts), rather than measure what is remembered (Tynjälä, 1999).Thus we designed a full-cycle epistemic task that takes into account Mayer’s principles for con-structivist learning (selecting, organising and integrating) and using feedback rather than formalassessment. A full-cycle epistemic task is a task that involves a pre-lecture podcast, the lectureitself, a post-lecture review activity (eg, written answers to the epistemic questions ending thepodcast episodes) and finally a short feedback on the review activity. It is important to note herethat because this is most probably the first time that the students who took part in this study wereexposed to this full-cycle, and specifically podcasting technology in the form of a pre-lecturepodcast, it was considered necessary to determine the students’ perceptions and satisfactionwith it, which was seen as a major factor of its success. The study, thus, explores solely students’evaluation of the perceived/experienced effectiveness of the podcasts and epistemic questionsas a priming method on their learning from lectures and deeper understanding of the subject.Formulated on the base of the literature, the hypothesis studied was: providing students with bothbackground knowledge on which they can “hang” new information and epistemic questionsprior to lectures would be experienced by them as a positive learning experience as they would feelstimulated to (1) engage more deeply with the lecture and understand the content better and (2)reflect on the topics and on what they know about them.

MethodParticipantsParticipants were undergraduate psychology students at a mid-sized British university. Gendercomposition of the respondents in the study (N = 49) was similar to that of the complete cohort(n = 99) (respondents: 41 females = 84%, eight males = 16%; cohort: 83 females = 84%, 16males = 16%). The average age of the respondents was 20.04 years (SD = 1.06).

MaterialsThe podcasts were about 5 minutes of length and consisted of an introduction to the maintheories from the upcoming lecture, summary definitions of core concepts and examples. Theepistemic questions ending the podcast episodes were explanatory (eg, “How could ‘human sense’explain the finding that children from lower socio-economic status develop cognitively at a slowerrate than children from high socio-economic status?”), predictive (eg, “With respect to Kohlberg’smodel, what kind of activities do you think could facilitate moral development?”) or argumenta-tive questions (eg, “Based on [the research] of development of perception, how would you designa mobile for infants?”).

A paper-based end-of-semester evaluation questionnaire gathered data from the students presentat the last lecture (n = 49; 49.5% of the students taking the course). A set of Likert-type questionswere asked in relation to the perceived effects of the podcasts and another set of Likert-type



questions aimed to grasp students evaluation of the effects of the epistemic questions. Studentscould place their evaluation of each of the statements on a 5-point scale, ranging from 5“strongly agree” to 1 “strongly disagree”. Some items related to the perceived benefits of thepodcasts were borrowed and adapted from a questionnaire by Edirisingha, Rizzi, Nie and Rothwell(2007). Additionally, students were asked a number of questions to establish to what extentpodcasts were a novelty, and how and why students made use of them.

ProcedureThe podcasts’ narratives and questions were prepared jointly by the course lecturer and theresearchers. The lecturer recorded the podcasts using Audacity (Version 1.2.6), a free soundrecording software program. The podcasts were edited to include musical background and savedin mp3 format. They were made available on the unit’s Moodle page and sent by email to thestudents 2 days prior to each of the six lectures during one semester. During the introductorylecture, students were informed about the availability of the podcasts and reminded aboutit consecutively throughout lectures. At the end of the last lecture, the paper-based evaluationquestionnaire was distributed to all the present students and collected upon completion. Studentswere informed that the study was part of an external independent research and that all theinformation they provide serves only the purpose of this research.

ResultsThe majority of the questionnaire respondents (80%) reported having listened to at least three ofthe six podcasts. There was relatively high interest in the podcasts, the first being most listened toand only the last one listened to by just less than half of the respondents (see Table 1). Thisdecrease is most likely due to the fact that students had to submit an essay at that momentthat also caused lecture attendance for weeks 6 and 7 to drop. When students did not listen, theyreported that it was because they forgot to listen and/or lacked or poorly allocated time. Technicalissues occurred occasionally, such as the sound of the podcast being low or not available from thelibrary’s computers.

More than half of the respondents (55%) reported listening to other podcasts, mainly entertain-ment (37%), news (33%) and educational podcasts (26%). Even though one student onlyreported to have listened to other lecture podcasts, it seems reasonable to expect that this is not acompletely unfamiliar technology, especially if half of the respondents stated they listen regularly.

Activities while listeningRespondents predominantly reported just listening to the podcasts (65%), without engagingin other activities at the same time. When they did engage in other activities simultaneous tolistening, these were: visiting the unit page on Moodle (29%), taking notes (18%) or carryingout other student related work (12%). Only a few did some non-study-focused activities, such astidying the room, organising daily work, sorting books, cooking, surfing the Internet, gettingready to leave the house for the lecture and other personal activities.

Effects of the podcastsTable 2 shows the results of multiple one-way comparative tests run to reject or accept a treat-ment effect hypothesis. The t-test shows that the treatment hypothesis is largely accepted withsignificant size effects. The only statement for which no treatment effect was found was related to

Table 1: Frequency of listening to each podcast episode (in %)

Lecture 1 Lecture 2 Lecture 3 Lecture 4 Lecture 5 Lecture 6

80 84 65 59 65 45



whether students thought listening to the course podcasts made them more interested in listeningto other podcasts.

Effect of the podcast questionsThe results of the t-tests show that students felt the podcast questions affected their reflection,activation of prior knowledge, understanding of the subject and general deepening of knowledge.They did not feel stimulated to seek additional information, nor to discuss with peers (Table 3).

Reasons for listening to podcasts more than onceThirty-one respondents (or 63%) reported re-listening to the podcasts, mainly to make sure theyunderstood the content (26 respondents) and because they thought it would help them answerthe question at the end of the podcast (19 respondents). Reasons occurring less often were notetaking (n = 9), re-listening just to the question (n = 8), to memorise the information (n = 6),writing down references mentioned in the podcasts (n = 5) and initial technical problems (n = 1).

DiscussionAlthough this study does not provide results on the actual impact of using epistemic organisingpodcasts on learning in terms of performance, it does give an insight on students’ motivation touse such additional resources to gain more from lectures. The evaluation provided by the studentsessentially confirmed the hypothesis that audio-only primer podcasts were experienced as stimu-lating for students to (1) engage more deeply with the lecture and understand the content betterand (2) reflect on the topics and on what they know about them.

The responses indicate that the podcasts were taken seriously as part of the learning process,as students reported having focused predominantly on listening and on study-related activities,rather than listening to the podcasts as a background sound. As well, the majority of the respond-

Table 2: Effects of the podcasts (test value = 3)

Listening to the podcast . . . t Mean df d

made me feel acquainted with the lecturer 8.152 3.86 48 1.16helped me understand the topic better 7.924 3.78 48 1.13helped me organise the concepts and ideas 7.325 3.84 48 1.05made me think more deeply about the topics in the podcasts 3.504 3.47 48 0.50helped me focus my attention in class 3.464 3.43 48 0.50made me interested in looking for other podcasts -1.566 2.80 48 *

*An effect size is not calculated when the value of t obtained is smaller than t critical.

Table 3: Effects of the podcast questions (test value = 3; p < 0.05)

t Mean df d

I was reflecting on the content of the podcast 7.245 3.69 47 1.05I was thinking of what I already knew of the topic 6.856 3.75 47 0.99I understood the subject better 4.014 3.52 47 0.58I was asking myself similar questions 3.022 3.35 47 0.44I deepened my knowledge on the subject 2.729 3.40 47 0.39I was reflecting during the lecture 1.307 3.17 47 *I was asking similar questions during lectures -4.893 2.44 47 -0.71I was seeking answers by browsing the literature/internet -4.687 2.40 47 -0.68I discussed the questions with peers -3.214 2.56 47 -0.46

*An effect size is not calculated when the value of t obtained is smaller than t critical.



ents stated having listened to the podcasts more than once, in order to understand them betterand be able to answer the epistemic questions. Thus not surprisingly students largely reportedthey perceived advance organiser podcasts as affecting their learning in terms of better under-standing the material, better organising concepts and ideas, better focusing their attention andgenerally facilitating deeper thinking about the content. Learning theory explains these findings.In terms of Ausubel’s subsumption theory (Ausubel, 1960), the podcasts can be seen as func-tioning as advance organisers and providing a basic structure around which new informationis organised. Schema theory also predicts that familiarity with the content would enhance com-prehension as it provides a framework in which the learner can position the new information(Anderson & Pearson, 1984). A general facilitation of learning and understanding of the subjectare typically among the most often reported effects of podcasts (see Heilesen, 2010 and Hew,2008 for reviews). For instance, Bolliger, Supanakorn and Boggs (2010) researched the effectsof several types of podcasts (eg, introductory, lecture and supplementary podcasts) withinonline courses settings and reported that all types positively impacted motivation and attentionand helped the students’ learning processes. Edirisingha et al (2007) used podcasts generated bystudents and/or tutors to help students improve study and presentation skills and explained thepositive results by the flexibility to listen at convenient time, place and pace, to revisit key conceptsand pace the learning activities from the teacher into the learner’s hands.

Students reported they felt stimulated by the epistemic questions to reflect on the content of thepodcasts, to activate existing prior knowledge on the topic and to ask themselves similar questionsand had a feeling of a general facilitation of learning and better understanding of the subject.Previous research has demonstrated that high-level advance questions, and particularly ques-tions requiring explanation and elaboration, help activate prior knowledge and induce cognitiveprocesses such as selection, knowledge integration and application (Osman & Hannafin, 1994;Pressley et al, 1992).

Furthermore, students thought that the questions stimulated them to ask themselves similarquestions. The self-directed question-generation is found to “promote deeper understanding,initiate recall of background knowledge, require integration of prior knowledge” (Rosenshine,Meister & Chapman, 1996, p. 200) and is a strong index for metacognition (Spiers & Gallini,1988). Unfortunately, we do not have any examples of students’ self-questions, therefore wecannot evaluate whether these were really at the same level of complexity.

Surprisingly, students stated that the podcast questions did not stimulate them to reflect during thelecture on what was asked in the question. It was expected that primer questions would directstudents’ attention to specific bits of information presented during lecture, as it is typically the casefor advance adjunct questions. Closer examination brought us to observe that the statementformulation was ambiguous or misleading, as the students were asked whether the podcastquestion encouraged them to reflect during the lecture but unfortunately did not stipulate whetherthis meant reflecting on the lecture in general or reflecting on the question posed in the podcast.

A generic positive experience with podcasts was found here, namely becoming acquainted withthe lecturer. We acknowledge that different types of content lend themselves differently to sound-ing more or less “informal,” for instance discussions would be more spontaneous than scriptedsummaries or advance organisers. Nevertheless, students typically prefer a familiar voice and theinformal, relaxed tone of their lecturer (Taylor & Clark, 2010), which gives an increased feelingof proximity through the podcast as compared with other materials (Fernandez et al, 2009). Wefound similar results, even though in our case the informal aspect came more as an afterthoughtto the lecturer than as a planned approach. We believe this is yet another aspect of usingeducational audio that adds to the motivation and engagement of the students in the learningprocess.



ConclusionThe study demonstrates the importance of understanding how learners can best be stimulatedto engage in and respond to learning before investing time and other resources in developinglearning aids. Our observations did not find any significant changes or correlations between thenumber of students attending lectures and the availability of podcasts, but as in a majority ofother studies, the students reported greater/deeper engagement. If podcasts are thoughtfullyintegrated into the existing and still prevailing use of lectures, they have the potential to enhancedeeper levels of learning, especially if they involve students in carrying out epistemic tasks. Thisis, in any event, the opinion of the students as reported here, which is in line with the CognitiveEvaluation Theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000), which holds that the perception of certain aspects of thesocial and task environment are crucial to intrinsic motivation. It is encouraging that studentswere positive about the podcasts. Though actual learning improvement was not reported here,the post-lecture review activities that were part of the full-cycle epistemic task were collectedand are subject of further analysis. Such an analysis is necessary to determine whether primerpodcasts can be effectively used to enhance learning itself.

This study used audio-only podcasts, as lecture handouts were already available to the students.McKinney et al (2009) reported in a very similar condition (ie, PowerPoint® lecture handoutsmade available for note taking) that the students in the podcast and PowerPoint® conditionoutperformed the control group who attended the face-to-face lecture with the same slides, onan exam on the lecture content. Nevertheless, enhanced podcasts should be considered particu-larly when lecture handouts are not available. Research has demonstrated the effectiveness ofenhanced podcasts on better recall and application tasks compared with audio-only podcasts(Kennedy, Hart & Kellems, 2010). However, we would recommend Mayer’s (2001) cognitivetheory of multimedia learning to be considered as a framework for creating the most appropriatetypes of podcasts for optimal learning results.

As well, although podcasts can be beneficial to students with learning disabilities such as dyslexia(Barton, Penny & Riordan, 2007), the needs of students with hearing disabilities should also betaken into account. In such cases, podcasts transcripts could easily be made available.

Furthermore, it would be useful to conduct research to explore how primer podcasts would affectlearning in larger scale cohorts where variance of prior knowledge and students’ motivationcould vary greatly.

This study adds evidence on certain aspects of the usage of educational audio podcasts. As amajority of other podcast studies shows, despite the ubiquitous presence of technology, there isonly a small proportion of students who intuitively merge their technological gadgets with learn-ing. Margaryan, Littlejohn and Vojt (2011), for example, reported that university students (ie,members of the Net generation) use a limited range of technologies for learning and socialisationas did Bullen, Morgan, Belfer and Qayyum (2008), Ebner, Schiefner and Nagler (2008), Kennedyet al (2007), and Kvavik (2005). As we all know, tool appropriation is almost impossible if theintended users do not themselves experience the tool as positive. The first step has now beentaken.

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Effects of primer podcasts on stimulating learning from lectures: How do students engage?