When I see a title like “Do Podcasts Help Students Learn” in an article, paper, blog or any other location I know for certain that I will see some variation of the following statement in the document:
Overall, the study found no statistical difference between the performance of students who used…
In this article the “no significant difference” statement came just a few paragraphs into the piece. Anyone who has more that just an Introduction to Psychology or Educational Psychology course should know that measuring learning is a very challenging task. It is much easier to measure the factors that contribute to an effective learning environment like, engagement, motivation, time on task etc. and fortunately some of these factors were included in the article. While the researchers in this study found no statistical difference between the performance of students who used podcasts over those using text it did reveal the following:
1. Podcasts grab attention and maintain it.
2. Students conceptually understood the content, not just remembered it, and the scale of understanding seemed to tip toward the podcasts.
3. The students who said they weren’t that motivated at the beginning of the class scored higher on the test when they listened to the podcasts.
So the students who used the podcasts were more engaged, understood the concepts better and were more motivated. While we aren’t sure if podcast help students learn they do contribute to the factors necessary for effective learning environments. The study also reveals that the men who participated in the study increased their post test scores and general the students like using the podcasts.
If we step back from the fact that this is an implementation of a relatively simple to use technology and look at the pedagogy we will see that condensing information into a 10 minute summary enhanced by audio and video, is there any wonder that students preferred these supplements and were more engaged. If we just look at the learning the title of the piece could have been “Do Effective Instructor Class Summaries Help Students Learn.” But that doesn’t increase hits or solicit reader responses…
