Journal of Education and Learning; Vol. 10, No. 6; 2021
ISSN 1927-5250 E-ISSN 1927-5269
Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education
1
Reality Versus Beliefs About the Effects of the Preview Learning
Method
Yanlin Li
1
1
King’s Academy, Madaba, 16188, Jordan
Correspondence: Yanlin Li, King’s Academy, Madaba, 16188, Jordan.
Received: May 31, 2021 Accepted: August 20, 2021 Online Published: October 11, 2021
doi:10.5539/jel.v10n6p1 URL: https://doi.org/10.5539/jel.v10n6p1
Abstract
This study is mainly designed to evaluate a popular learning method: previewing material before classes and to
answer two research questions on the learning method. The research questions are “Does previewing have
benefits in promoting future learning?” and “Do people have correct metacognitive judgements on the effects of
previewing?” The hypothesis states that previewing is beneficial in ways other than directly pre-stating answers
(e.g., providing context information or keywords) and that, in general, individuals’ judgements on the effects of
previewing are correct. This experiment found that participants who read preview materials before watching a
brief lecture do not perform significantly better on post-tests than participants who have not read the preview. At
the same time, most people who read preview materials see the preview as beneficial to their understanding of
the topic, which is an incorrect metacognitive judgement. This study indicates that the importance of preview for
learning performance may be a myth and reveals how people misjudge the benefits of previewing. These
findings can lead to an improved understanding of better ways to conduct self-cognitive study.
Keywords: memory, metacognitive judgements, preview
1. Introduction
1.1 Introduction to the Preview Method and Its Potential Benefits
Providing students with pre-class preview material has become a popular pedagogical tool in many schools, and
this preview method has been receiving increasingly more attention from educators. Educators expect that
preview materials will introduce students to new information earlier and better prepare students for further
learning in classes (Songrong, 2014; Wang, 2008; Oi, Okubo, Shimada, Yin, & Ogata, 2015).
Guoping Wang (2008) included previewing when he presented his educational method at the 38th Annual
Frontiers in Education Conference. According to him, warm-up exercises before class—including a
preview—can maximize students’ interactions with teachers in a class by familiarizing them with new
information. In a 2015 investigation with 98 college students, Misato Oi et al. (2015) found that students who
have the habit of previewing showed higher achievement than those who do not do preview, further suggesting
that previewing may be positively related to students’ academic performance.
Previewing can improve the efficacy of studying in two primary ways: 1) strengthening retention of the given
material by directly pre-stating the information and 2) promoting further learning on a given topic in ways
including but not limited to stimulating interest in the topic and increasing concentration in class. To
experimentally confirm the first benefit of previewing, we aim to test how much people learn from the preview
by offering preview materials that mention information that is included in the post-test or post-assessment. To
experimentally confirm the second benefit, we aim to test how much previewing helps people learn in a formal
studying format, such as before a lecture, and whether it promotes future learning on the topic. In this case, the
preview material should help students achieve better results without providing information that can be directly
used to answer the post-test.
1.2 Relevant Scholarship
Many teachers encourage previewing in classrooms, and other similar pedagogical tools—such as pre-tests—are
often used before the formal learning process. Pre-testing is a learning method that is similar to, but distinct from,
previewing.
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Unlike previews, pre-tests often do not directly offer standard answers and information for students; instead, they
require that students look for the information in the formal studying process, which usually consists of lectures.
Studies show that pre-tests enhance educational learning for students, even when pre-tests do not provide correct
answers to the post-tests (Richland, Kornell, & Kao, 2009). This effect could indicate that preview materials
before classes may similarly benefit students by promoting future learning (Bjork, 1994; Carrier & Pashler,
1992).
If, in our review study, preview is only shown to be beneficial in that it reinforces learners’ memories of certain
information mentioned in the preview text, it doesn’t differ much from standard revision, in which people review
the same information learned in classes. However, if preview is shown to promote people’s future learning, our
study would then prove preview’s unique value to the learning process, especially for self-regulated study.
On the other hand, Minsu Kim (2016) investigated the effect of previewing on mathematics self-efficacy. The
results show a direct relationship between the two variables, which means that previewing increases students’
confidence in their academic abilities (Bandura, 2010). However, increased confidence is not necessarily a
guarantee of concrete improvements in learning performance.
This potential difference between the actual effects of preview and people’s beliefs about their performance due
to preview leads to the second research question in this paper: are people’s metacognitive judgements on the
effects of previewing correct? It is also important to note that self-efficacy is a distinct concept from
metacognitive judgements; however, they are related concepts that discuss people’s or metacognition.
Metacognition is people’s knowledge of their own knowledge, and metacognitive judgements about one’s own
learning experience consist of individuals’ assessment of their own knowledge on certain topics they are learning.
Such subjective judgements may or may not be accurate (Dunlosky & Lipko, 2007).
Metacognitive judgements are important to study because, when they are accurate, people can take more
effective ownership over their own learning and become “fully self-regulating learners” (Metcalfe, 2009).
Investigating people’s metacognitive judgements on the effect of previewing helps to further indicate the
potential benefits or harm of previewing, as metacognition influences people’s understanding and control of their
learning experience.
1.3 Hypotheses
My first research question is whether previewing is effective for promoting future learning. My hypothesis is
positive—that preview is valuable in ways other than strengthening retention. My second research question is
whether people have correct metacognitive judgements on the effectiveness of previewing. My hypothesis is that
both preview’s actual effects and people’s beliefs about its effects are positive and significant, and therefore,
most people have correct metacognitive judgements about previewing.
2. Method
2.1 Participants
A total of 95 participants participated in the experiment, among which 38 were in the experimental group and 57
were in the control group. The average age of the participants was 38 years-old, and the range of their ages was
21−69 years old. 36 of the participants were female, and 59 were male.
All participants were native English speakers above the age of 18 and were currently living in the United States.
The participants were recruited on the website Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) Worker with a participation
fee of $1.50 each. No response from any participant was excluded.
2.2 Materials
In the experiment, participants read a brief 200-word written preview text providing information about
Yellowstone National Park in the United States. After this, participants listened to a five-minute lecture that
introduced the same key information included in the preview, such as an overview of Yellowstone’s wildlife,
mountains, and geothermal features. The lecture consisted of five one-minute videos that showed pictures of
Yellowstone National Park. A voiceover narrator read a detailed description of the same aspects of the park
discussed in the preview text.
2.3 Measures
2.3.1 Memory Recall
The post-test at the end of the experiment consisted of eleven multiple-choice questions, the answers to which
could be found in the lecture but not in the preview text. For example, one of the questions asked, “What is the
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tallest geyser in Yellowstone National Park?” The four choices were “Old Faithful,” “Steamboat Geyser,”
“Castle Geyser” and “Daisy Geyser,” and the only correct answer was “Steamboat Geyser.” The fact that the
preview did not include the answers for the post-test ensured that the experiment tested whether previewing
promotes learning about the topic instead of only strengthening a student’s memory of specific answers.
2.3.2 Metacognition
After the post-test, participants who read the preview material answered a survey question: “Did you expect the
preview to be useful in your performance on the test?” Whether participants’ answers in this session matched the
result of their post-test performance indicated the accuracy of their metacognitive judgements.
2.4 Design
In this experiment, I investigated the effect of preview on participants’ learning performances shown in the
post-test and the effect of preview on participants’ confidence in their performance. Participants were sorted into
two groups, the experimental group and the control group, based on their birth months. Participants with odd
birth months were put into the experimental group, in which they read a preview text on a certain topic, listened
to a five-minute lecture on the same topic, and took a post-test at the end to examine their understanding of the
topic. Meanwhile, participants with even birth months were put into the control group in which they were not
shown the preview text, and they took the post-test only based on the five-minute lecture. After the post-test,
participants in the experimental group filled out a survey to predict the effect of the preview text on their
post-test scores. At the end of the experiment, all participants also answered several questions on their basic
information.
2.5 Procedure
After the participants read and agreed to informed consent for this experiment, they indicated whether their birth
month was even or odd. Participants with an odd birth month were placed in the experimental group. These
participants were able to see the preview text and the survey questions that asked for their predictions on the
effect of the preview. These participants went through five sessions in total: sessions 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. The
participants with even birth months were placed in the control group. These participants were not able to see the
preview text or the prediction questions, and they participated in only three sessions: sessions 2, 3 and 5. The
sessions ran as follows:
Session 1: The preview session. In this session, participants in the experimental group read a 200-word written
text in two minutes, as a preview on the topic of Yellowstone National Park, before watching the lecture. They
could choose to take notes or not.
Session 2: All participants, both in the experimental group and control group, listened to five successive lecture
videos that were each about one-minute long. (They had to click “Next” after each video finished to go to the
next video.)
Session 3: This session included eleven post-test questions for all participants. All of the questions were
multiple-choice questions on Yellowstone National Park. Participants had unlimited time to answer the
questions.
Session 4: This was a survey session only for the experimental group to predict the effect of previewing on their
test performance. They were asked questions including whether they use previews in real life, whether they
believe the preview text in the experiment had benefitted their test performance and why the preview may have
benefitted them. Participants had unlimited time to answer the questions.
Session 5: All participants answered several questions on their basic information, including their age, gender and
English language level. They were also asked whether they benefited from their previous knowledge about
Yellowstone National Park in the post-test. Participants had unlimited time to answer the questions.
3. Results
In this experiment, the results from the 38 participants in the experimental group and 57 participants in the
control group showed that participants who read the preview material and watched the lecture performed slightly
better in the post-test than participants who only watched the lecture. (All the 95 participants denied that they
have benefitted from their prior knowledge about Yellowstone National Park.) Participants in the experimental
group obtained better scores, with 11 as the full score (M = 6.34, SD = 2.69), than participants in the control
group (M = 5.93, SD = 2.47). However, though the statistical result demonstrates a small difference indicating
that preview may have positively impacted participants’ post-test performance, this difference is not significant,
t(93) = -0.768, p = 0.444, d = -0.161. This lack of significance means that the stated hypothesis was incorrect.
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Instead, this study shows that previewing does not have a significant benefit in promoting learning.
Table 1. Mean correlations of the effect of preview and post-test scores
Descriptives
Descriptives Is your birth month even or odd? Scores
N Even 57
Odd 38
Mean Even
Odd
5.93
6.34
Standard deviation Even
Odd
2.47
2.69
Independent Samples T-Test
Independent Samples T-Test statistic df p Cohen’s d
Score Student’s t -0.768 93.0 0.444 -0.161
Furthermore, according to a statistical analysis of the answers from the survey questions, many more participants
in the experimental group believed that the preview experience in the experiment benefitted their performance in
the post-test (Proportion = 0.887) than those who believed that the preview experience did not help them
(Proportion = 0.113). This difference is significant, p < 0.001. At the same time, since some of the participants
in the control group also answered this question by mistake, there were 19 responses from the control group
answering this same question, which showed that more participants in the control group believed that having
preview material would have benefitted their performance on the post-test (Proportion = 0.947) than those who
believed otherwise (Proportion = 0.053).
Table 2. Proportion test of the belief about the effect of preview from participants in the experimental group
Proportion Test (2 Outcomes)
Binomial Test Level Count Total Proportion p
Do you expect this preview to be useful to your performance
in the test?
No 5 34 0.147 < .001
Yes 29 34 0.853 < .001
Note. H
a
is proportion ≠ 0.5.
Table 3. Proportion test of the belief about the effect of preview from participants in the control group
Proportion Test (2 Outcomes)
Binomial Test Level Count Total Proportion p
Do you expect this preview to be useful to your performance
in the test?
No 1 19 0.053 < .001
Yes 18 19 0.947 < .001
Note. H
a
is proportion ≠ 0.5.
4. Discussion and Conclusions
The two research questions are answered by the experiment. For the first research question, the results do not
support the hypothesis that previewing promotes future learning. Instead, this study shows that preview does not
provide significant benefits for participants’ further learning on a given topic, which means that it does not prove
that previewing can promote people’s future learning.
There could be various reasons for this result, including that the sample size was not large enough to obtain
accurate results; the lecture and the preview were not long enough to imitate real-life lectures; and the preview
method may not actually be effective in promoting students’ learning in lectures. (All the participants denied that
they have benefited from their prior knowledge about Yellowstone National Park in Session Five.) The
insignificance in the difference between the learning of the two groups of participants suggests that previewing
may not be as useful a method as people would expect. However, this does not necessarily mean that preview
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has no benefits for academic performance in real life. In this study, as I was investigating the ability of preview
to promote future learning benefits, I did not include information on the answers to the post-test questions in the
preview material. In real life, when people are previewing material before lessons, it is possible that they may
read information important and useful to their tests or other academic experiences that could also improve their
learning. As familiarity has direct positive influences on memory retrieval (Holden & Vanhuele, 1999), reading
valuable information multiple times could result in a better understanding of the subject and therefore benefit
study performance.
For the second research question, the results show that, despite preview’s actual effects, most people who
preview materials perceive that preview benefits their study performance. Many participants had incorrect
metacognitive judgements on the effects of preview; they falsely believed that preview benefitted their learning
of the topic. This conclusion does not support my hypothesis and indicates that most people have incorrect
assumptions about the benefits of the preview method for promoting future learning.
This study does not investigate the source of participants’ mistaken beliefs about previewing. One possible
reason for participants’ demonstrated incorrect beliefs is that the diction included in the post-test questions was
more familiar to participants in the experimental group because they had been exposed to the same diction in the
preview. This familiarity may have increased their fluency when retrieving retained information, and this fluency
during the processing of information may have influenced and misled participants’ metacognitive judgements
when deciding on the value of the preview material (Bjork, Dunlosky, & Kornell, 2013).
Another possible reason is that participants may be aware of the generally positive reputation of the preview
method. The results in Table 3 from people in the control group show that people believe previewing to be
valuable to their academic performance on a given task even when they have not previewed material for that
specific task. However, to explain this phenomenon more conclusively would require further investigation on the
influence preview has on metacognition.
A potential limitation of this study is that conclusions are drawn according to data collected from less than a
hundred participants. Another possible limitation is that the post-test focused on answering trivia questions about
Yellowstone National Park, which is not typically the type of material for which the preview method is used,
because, in real life, tests are more often designed for skill learning, instead of memorization of details. In the
future, the results of this study could be supported further if more people were included in the sample groups and
the purpose of previewing in the study included questions on other topics, including science and math.
This study concludes that the preview learning method does not benefit people’s future learning, while most
people tend to believe the opposite.
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