Joke Coens

Listening to an Educational Podcast While Walking or Jogging: Can Students Really Multitask?

The advent of podcasting offers opportunities for students to learn while performing another activity. While podcasting is advocated by many as helping to learn anywhere and anytime, research indicates that it is not so easy for people to do two things at the same time. Two experiments were set up to examine the effect of performing a secondary task while learning with an iPod. In the experimental groups, the participants had to combine a learning task listening to an educational podcast with a secondary task walking or jogging. The control group only had to perform a learning task. Afterwards, all the participants had to complete a learning test. In the first study, there were no significant differences between the learning performances of students of the different conditions. In the second study, the students who were sitting down outperformed the students who were moving while studying.

The use of ipods in education: The case of multi-tasking

Different authors indicate that the use of iPods in education provides the benefit for students to learn when and where they want. They can learn while even performing another activity such as fitness, taking the train, etc. In short, they can become mobile learners. However, empirical evidence is missing on whether this is indeed beneficial for learners and what the consequences are of this multi-tasking on learning. In this contribution, three empirical studies are reported that address the influence of a second task while learning from an iPod. Results show that in the first two studies, the control group outperformed the experimental group, suggesting that the second task interfered with learning, while in the third study no differences were found.

Disentangling Teaching and Summative Assessment in Higher Education? Pros and Cons from Students’ Perspectives

The impact of the examiner on students’ perspectives on learning and assessment is investigated. A disentangling of support and evaluation roles was implemented for two courses. The lecturer did not have the responsibility for the summative evaluation. Instead, this was the task of an examiner. Students’ conceptions of the disentangling were investigated by means of focus groups (N = 21) before and open-ended questionnaires (N = 50 and N = 18) after the actual disentangled courses. Results showed as well pros as contras. Pros were that students felt free to express their own opinion during the examination, that they could ‘team up’ with the lecturer during the academic year, and that some of them believed this enabled the examiner to pass them a more objective judgment. Contras were that some students felt uncomfortable because they did not know the examiner, that they feared a wrong first impression would result in a less objective evaluation or that some students reported that they would behave less respectful to the lecturer if this person would no longer examine them. Students’ arguments thus reveal what matters to them in assessment: they desire a reliable, a valid and a transparent evaluation.