Fine-tuning online education
Andrew Ho, research director of HarvardX and an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), spoke with the Gazette about a recent study that found that interspersing online lectures with short tests improved student performance. The practice cut student mind-wandering by half, tripled the rate of note-taking, and improved overall retention of the material, according to the research, published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. GAZETTE: In describing the study, senior author Daniel Schacter, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology, said there is “shockingly little” hard scientific data on how students learn online — how useful do you see this new study as being? HO: Of course it’s incredibly important. Dan is a member of our HarvardX Research Committee, which is charged with coordinating and supporting the research mission of HarvardX, and research like this is one reason he’s on that committee,...