For example, Zeamer and Fox Tree (2013) examined how different types of auditory distraction would impact comprehension of lecture material while participants watched recorded lectures.
Enabled by smartphones and similar devices, mobile app technology is well suited to facilitate student engagement with such 'chunk-sized' knowledge, leading to better comprehension of lecture material (Lah, Saat, & Hassan, 2014).
Not only that, but learners in-view of people using laptops for non-academic reasons also had reduced comprehension of lecture material, the study found.
According to DeCarrico and Nattinger (1988, p. 91), comprehension of academic lectures by non-native speakers has long been a neglected problem and has only recently been seriously addressed.
Zeamer and Fox Tree found that irrelevant speech, laughter, and unusual noises (i.e., construction noise, people coughing and sneezing) all negatively impacted comprehension of the lecture material.
Based on these considerations, Armbruster suggested that to reduce the learner's load in selection process and to let the learner to focus on connection process are promising to improve the learner's comprehension of a lecture (Armbruster, 2009).
These researches, then, indicated that the learner's performance in the connection process has stronger influence to the learner's comprehension of a lecture than the performance in the selection process.
For the teacher, the accumulated data gives immediate feedback on student comprehension — allowing tailoring of lectures to address problematic material — and tracks student or class progress over time.
Audience perception and comprehension improves with addressing audience composition, content of lectures and workshops, delivery by the lecturers and on-going dynamic modification based on feedback from all participants.
Laptop use negatively related to multiple learning outcomes including course grade, focus on lectures, reported clarity of lectures, exam performance, and comprehension (Fried, 2008; Kraushaar & Novak, 2010; Wood et al., 2012; Zhang, 2015).
True, much online learning today is a "monologue, not a dialogue," little more than YouTube-like videos of lectures "assessed" by simplistic post-lecture quizzes that measure engagement and comprehension when it's too late to deliver what students missed.
