Benefits of asking students to make an instructional video of a multimedia lesson: Clarifying the learning‐by‐teaching hypothesis.

Background: Learning‐by‐teaching is a generative learning strategy in which students are told they will have to teach what they are learning to others. Although learning‐by‐teaching has been shown to be effective in some cases, few studies have established guidelines for how to optimize the benefits of learning‐by‐teaching as a generative learning strategy from a social presence perspective. Objectives: This study seeks to clarify the learning‐by‐teaching hypothesis and to pinpoint the optimal level of social presence during learning‐by‐teaching that is most conducive to learning. Methods: In Experiment 1, college students received a lesson with instructions that afterwards they would explain the material to others by making a video, explain the material aloud to themselves, or restudy the material. In Experiment 2, college students viewed a multimedia lesson with instructions that afterwards they would explain the materials by making a video, explain to an onscreen student, or explain to a student in person. Results and Conclusions: Teaching by making a video was better than restudying, self‐explaining, and teaching face‐to‐face or online. Teaching quality was better in video teaching than self‐explaining and face‐to‐face or online teaching. Teaching by making a video is ideal because it primes generative processing while minimizing extraneous processing. Implications: This study is the first to manipulate different levels of social presence of oral teaching to determine the optimal form of learning‐by‐teaching, which preliminarily clarifies generative learning and social presence theory and has implications for both empirical and theoretical research. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic: Learning‐by‐teaching is a generative learning strategy in which learners are told they will explain the material in the lesson to others after the lesson.Although learning‐by‐teaching has been shown to be effective in some cases, few studies have established guidelines for how to optimize the benefits of learning‐by‐teaching as a generative learning strategy from a social presence perspective. What this paper adds: Teaching by making a video was better than restudying, self‐explaining, and teaching face‐to‐face or online.Teaching quality was better in video teaching than self‐explaining and face‐to‐face or online teaching.Making a video creates suitable and lower social presence but more generative processing.This work shows the importance of balancing the positive effects of a moderate amount of social presence as a motivator with the potential negative effects of too much social presence as a distractor. Implications for practice and/or policy: Instructors should encourage students to record an instructional video explaining what they learned from a lesson. This serves as a generative learning activity that is more effective than self‐explaining or restudying the materials.The sense of social presence during teaching activities should not be too high. Thus, asking students to teach face‐to‐face is not a recommended approach.Instructors should set an appropriate level of social presence and take care to avoid adding extraneous distractions when implementing learning‐by‐teaching to help students achieve an optimal learning performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]