R3 2.17 October 25, 2024 Performance in Online Classes May Go Up When Cameras are On – But Anxiety Does Too

A head-to-head comparison of test scores, multitasking, appearance anxiety, and social presence reveals some surprising (and unsurprising) effects of requiring students to keep their web cameras on.

This issue of R3 focuses on another article drawn from a recent special issue of one of my favorite publications: Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. Volume 13, Issue 3 (September, 2024), Applying Cognitive Science to Improve Learning, has been a goldmine for finding recent research on a broad cross-section of pedagogically-relevant topics, featuring articles that could help enhance practice for just about anyone in instructional design or college teaching.

The article I chose for this issue is a great example. It’s about a question that started cropping up during emergency remote instruction a few years back, and that has continued to simmer along as a challenge that faculty seek guidance on, and frequently express frustration about: web cameras and whether they ought to be on or off during class meetings.

[Note: I’ve edited the post to correct a few occurrences of “asynchronous” that should be “synchronous,” spotted by a sharp-eyed reader. - MM]

Before we dive into that article, though, I also want to highlight a couple of new books coming out from the Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed book series, which I co-edit with James Lang and editor-at-large Derek Krissoff. Our fall catalog has a couple of volumes coming out in the next month that you might want to check out. First is Elizabeth Norell’s The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching. As the title promises, this one takes us through two key issues facing anyone seeking to become a truly great teacher: first, what presence means in the college classroom and why it is critically important for learning, and second, how we can gently confront and calm our own internal struggles to allow our very best teaching selves to emerge.

Next up in the series is a new book of my own, a short-and-sweet guide to dealing with a problem that afflicts nearly all of us in higher ed: how to remember students’ names. In writing it, I was able to tap into my origins as a theoretical psycholinguist way back in my early professional years, and had a lot of fun blending theory and practical advice along the way. For both of these, I’ll reiterate what just about all book authors do these days: pre-orders matter! Let me know if you would like any more information about either or both; I’m excited to share, especially with the publication dates drawing near.

With that, let’s turn to this issue’s focus article about online camera requirements – something that also turns out to matter, more than I would have predicted.

Citation:

Ramirez Perez, O. D., Ditta, A. S., & Soares, J. S. (2023). Turn Off, Tune Out? Testing the Effects of Webcam Use on Learning in Synchronous Online Classrooms. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 13(3), 370–378.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000145

Paywall or Open:  

Open

Summary:

This study explores the effects of student webcam usage during online lectures on learning outcomes and experiences, as well as the effects of interspersing quiz questions within the lecture. Researchers designed two experiments to simulate synchronous online classes in Zoom/Webex and tested whether keeping webcams on affected students' memory for class content, multitasking, anxieties relating to the appearance of self and surroundings, and perception of social presence.

Research Questions:

• Does having student webcams on during online synchronous lectures affect learning outcomes, self-reported multitasking behaviors, and/or self-consciousness?

• How do interpolated quiz questions during lectures affect performance, especially when cameras are not required?

• What is the impact of requiring that webcams stay on with respect to shaping students’ perception of community and other aspects of the learning experience?

Sample:

Undergraduate students were recruited through psychology courses for partial course credit; N = 123 (Experiment 1) and 131 (Experiment 2). Mean age was 20.3 (Experiment 1) and 20.1 (Experiment 2).

Method/Design:

There were two separate experiments, each simulating online synchronous class meetings using Zoom or Webex. In both experiments, participants attended 25-minute lectures on general-knowledge topics (e.g., cheesemaking). The lectures were delivered in a video meeting format, with group sizes ranging from 2 to 18 students.

In Experiment 1, participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: a "camera-on" condition, where they kept their webcams on throughout the lecture, and a "camera-off" condition. Additionally, there was an "interpolated quiz" condition in which five multiple-choice questions about the material being presented were embedded at intervals during the lecture.

After the lecture, participants completed a post-test consisting of 20 multiple-choice questions on the lecture content and survey questions measuring self-consciousness/anxiety (concerns about appearance and surroundings), and multitasking behaviors, and off-task thoughts.

Experiment 2 used a mixed design in which all participants experienced both "camera-on" and "camera-off" conditions across separate sessions. The experiment also introduced variations in social presence by assigning participants to either a "uniform" condition (where all participants had cameras on) or a "mixed" condition (where some participants had cameras on and others did not). The post-test included the same measures as in Experiment 1, with additional survey questions designed to measure the sense of social presence and sense of community.

Key Findings:

·      In Experiment 1, participants assigned to keep cameras on performed significantly better on the post-test covering content from the lecture. They also performed better with the interpolated quiz questions, although there was no significant interaction between quiz condition and camera condition (i.e., the effect of having the camera on or off was not magnified by the presence of quiz questions).

·      Participants assigned to keep cameras on reported significantly more concerns about self-presentation. They did not report significantly lower levels of multitasking per se or lower levels of off-task thoughts, but did report significantly lower levels of specific behaviors such as checking email and using social media.

·      In Experiment 2, participants assigned to keep cameras on performed significantly better on the post-test covering content from the lecture, but only in the mixed condition, in which some participants within a single group had cameras on and others did not.

·      The perception of social presence was significantly higher in the camera-on condition. This effect was magnified in the uniform condition.

·      There was no significant correlation between post-test scores and the social presence measures, suggesting that improvements associated with having cameras are due to accountability and fewer off-task behaviors, than to social presence per se.

Choice Quote from the Article:

Synchronous online classes that meet live over video conferencing software like Zoom have grown in popularity, with many universities expanding distance education programs. The rise of this course format has sparked debate on student webcam use, particularly about whether university students should be required to attend classes with their webcams on. Two experiments found that participants assigned to attend a lecture with their webcams on outperformed those with their webcams off on a test of the lectured content. This webcam effect persisted in classes in which half of the class turned on their webcams, but the webcam effect was significantly diminished in classes in which everyone used their webcams uniformly—all on or all off at any given time. These findings suggest that students could improve their learning by attending online classes with their webcams on, and that the benefits of using a webcam would be largest when not everyone has their webcam on at the same time. The results also suggest that promoting accountability and reducing media multitasking may be particularly important for improving learning in online classes.

Why it Matters:

My reactions, after reading the article, can be summed up like this: The policy implications of the findings are clear. It’s applying them that is going to be tricky.

Let’s get straight to what is not going to sit well with many people reading about the findings: the inclusion and equity implications of enforcing camera-on rules in online class meetings. Camera-on requirements – and the attendant opening of personal spaces to public view and increased need for better equipment and bandwidth  – have been heavily criticized as intrusive, exclusionary, or both. In the midst of the pandemic, I too went on the record advocating against making students appear on camera.

The authors, to their credit, address this issue head on. As they say in the introduction to the article:

[W]ebcam requirements for class attendance can burden students. In one end-of-semester survey, students cited concerns about appearance, weak internet, and lack of private space as reasons for attending classes with their webcams off, concerns that disproportionately affected underrepresented minority students (Castelli & Sarvary, 2021). In another set of experiments, participants randomly assigned to attend a Zoom lecture with their webcam on, including a mirrored view of themselves, reported more appearance anxiety than webcam-off participants (Tien et al., 2023).

There’s even a mechanism by which the advantages of camera-on learning could be washed out by another factor: appearance anxiety. Self-consciousness and worry associated with how your video feed appears to others, or similarly, how your surroundings appear, could in themselves drain off attention and thus capacity for learning. As the article points out as well, even Zoom fatigue wrought by sitting in one meeting after another could create cognitive decrements that counteract the positive impacts of camera-on policies.

These are all serious concerns that instructors should weigh before leaping straight to enforcing camera requirements. I think it’s worth brainstorming some ways to incorporate these findings while taking the edge off of some of the downsides.

Some options that the authors suggest include bringing in more practice testing, such as the interpolated quiz questions they used in Experiment 1. If cameras are optional, this practice might help keep performance (and perhaps attention and overall engagement) up to a reasonable level. (Caveat: I’m all for quizzing, but we should keep in mind that in this study, there was only a main effect of quizzing and not an interaction; i.e., quiz questions raised test performance across the board but not proportionately more in the camera-off condition.)

Here are some other ideas that came to me. Perhaps bringing in pre-commitment strategies could help – meaning, encouraging students to decide in advance that they do want to have their cameras on, and to be accountable for doing so. This is an approach that appeared in a study I reviewed in a recent issue of R3, in which students could opt in to requirements like mandatory attendance, and experienced a range of benefits (including increased feelings of autonomy) as a result. Or perhaps instructors could offer a certain number of camera-off tokens per semester – a couple of days on which students could be excused from the requirement, no questions asked. Regardless of the exact way web cameras could be handled in a given course, I think there’s a case to be made for transparency – of discussing, in a truly two-way fashion, why cameras are important and the reasoning behind the policies, with the ultimate goal of ensuring that students benefit from the time they’re putting in.

Lastly, I think that perhaps expectations could change now that we are no longer dealing with emergency remote instruction, a situation where students didn’t have a choice of format and perhaps weren’t even anticipating they would be in a synchronous online class in the first place. Given this, perhaps there will be fewer student concerns about the cameras-on expectation, especially if that expectation comes with some appropriate flexibility. Students are surely more savvy now about what synchronous online instruction entails, and especially if they have opted in to this specific format, a transparently presented and compassionately followed policy would work just fine.

Cameras have been one of those hot-button issues in teaching, to be sure; it reminds me of the massive amount of debate generated by the now-classic study on taking notes via laptops, and the many counter-arguments about requiring note-taking by hand. So even if you happen to be a die-hard opponent of camera requirements, I think being familiar with this new research is a good idea. Especially if you’re an instructional designer, teaching and learning center director, or educational developer, you can expect to field questions from faculty as this study starts to make the rounds.

Most Relevant For:

Instructional designers; online instructors; leaders involved in shaping classroom policies and technology policies

Limitations, Caveats, and Nagging Questions:

The key learning experience that participants went through was a simulated lecture on an arbitrary topic. There is plenty of precedent for this approach, which has been successfully used in similar studies on note-taking, distraction and the like. However, it would be informative to see how camera requirements play out in a more naturalistic setting, such as an actual semester-long class where the policy is built into the syllabus. Similarly, let’s acknowledge once again that lecture does not equal teaching. It would be interesting to look at camera requirements in a setting where there’s more active learning (although, to my mind at least, the interpolated condition with quiz questions sprinkled into the lecture slides is a form of active learning unto itself). And as the authors point out, the participant groups in the study were fairly small as “classes” go; there might be a different pattern of impacts in larger groups.

I also would note that while the study procedure provided a realistic approximation of an online lecture-style class, students were probably even less motivated than they would normally be to obtain a high score on the test. This possibility is consistent with the fairly low average on the post-test questions, which hovered around 50-60% correct across all the conditions.  Without skin in the game, it’s possible that the effect of having one’s camera off might have been accentuated; conversely, perhaps the camera policy mattered even less. This too is a good reason why replication in a naturalistic environment would tell us a lot more about the potential advantages of different camera policies.

If you liked this article, you might also appreciate:

Finley, J. R., Benjamin, A. S., & McCarley, J. S. (2014). Metacognition of multitasking: How well do we predict the costs of divided attention? Journal of Experimental Psychology. Applied, 20(2), 158–165. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000010

Godden, R., & Womack, A.-M. (2016). Making disability part of the conversation: Combatting inaccessible spaces and logics. Hybrid Pedagogy, (May 12). http://hybridpedagogy.org/making-disability-part-of-the-conversation/

Hwang, Y., Kim, H., & Jeong, S. H. (2014). Why do media users multitask?: Motives for general, medium-specific, and content-specific types of multitasking. Computers in Human Behavior, 36, 542–548. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.04.040

Lepp, A., Barkley, J. E., Karpinski, A. C., & Singh, S. (2019). College students’ multitasking behavior in online versus face-to-face courses. SAGE Open, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244018824505

McDaniel, M. A., Einstein, G. O., & Een, E. (2021). Training college students to use learning strategies: a framework and pilot course. Psychology Learning and Teaching, 20(3), 364–382. https://doi.org/10.1177/1475725721989489

Miller, M.D., Doherty, J.J., Butler, N., & Coull, W. (2020). Changing counterproductive beliefs about attention, memory, and multitasking: Impacts of a brief, fully online module. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 34, 710-723.

Ober, T. M., Brodsky, J. E., Yannaco, F. D., & Brooks, P. J. (2023). College instructors’ and students’ views of the use (and misuse) of personal mobile devices. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 9(1), 14–37. https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000214

Tien, I. S., Imundo, M. N., & Bjork, E. L. (2023). Viewing oneself during synchronous online learning increases appearance anxiety and decreases memory for lecture content. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 37(2), 443– 451. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.4048

Wong, S. S. H., & Lim, S. W. H. (2022). A mind-wandering account of the testing effect: Does context variation matter? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 29(1), 220–229. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-021-01989-8

Wood, E., Zivcakova, L., Gentile, P., Archer, K., De Pasquale, D., & Nosko, A. (2012). Examining the impact of off-task multi-tasking with technology on real-time classroom learning. Computers & Education, 58(1), 365–374. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.08.029

Wood, E., Zivcakova, L., Gentile, P., Archer, K., De Pasquale, D., & Nosko, A. (2012). Examining the impact of off-task multi-tasking with technology on real-time classroom learning. Computers & Education, 58(1), 365–374. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.08.029

 File under:  online synchronous format, class policies, attention, multitasking, social presence, DEI, memory