Pauses in educational videos: Testing the transience explanation against the structuring explanation

Abstract We tested whether pauses benefit learning in a longer lasting educational video about acoustic oscillations. Further, we tried to disentangle two explanations for the benefits of pauses. According to the transience explanation, pauses benefit learning because they allow learners to process less information concurrently. According to the structuring explanation, pauses benefit learning because they structure the content. Across two experiments, we presented the video including realistic video footage and explanatory animations in four conditions: a continuous video (both experiments), a video with pauses at empirically determined breakpoints (both experiments), a video with structural markers at empirically determined breakpoints (Experiment 1), and a video with pauses at alternative breakpoints that were intended to disturb the meaningful structure of the video (Experiment 2). In our main analyses, we did not observe any beneficial effects of pauses in longer lasting videos, so that we cannot provide clear-cut evidence in favor of any of the two explanations regarding the mechanism underlying the effects of pauses. Nevertheless, we discuss the learnings of the experiments to highlight pathways for future research.

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