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ICI Academic║Associate Professor Wang Xiaoming: How Online Teaching Promote Students’ Learning?

2020-06-05

Associate Professor Wang Xiaoming

ICI, ECNU

With the spread of COVID-19, online teaching has become the best choice for formal school teaching all over the world. Online teaching is not only a practice of interaction between teachers and students through online technology, but also a kind of teaching practice. How to give full play to the function of teaching to promote students’ learning is an unavoidable problem in the current large-scale online teaching. Students’ learning mainly involves psychological activities, which is carried out in working memory with limited capacity, and students’ original knowledge base influences greatly on their learning. Therefore, in order to achieve the purpose of promoting students’ learning, online teaching needs to adopt corresponding strategies according to the mechanisms of students’ learning mentioned above.

Dr. Wang first introduced the strategies of students’ psychological input activities triggered by online teaching:

We should not be satisfied with the primary stage of “pushing” teaching content to students through online teaching, we are supposed to consider adopting corresponding strategies to effectively guide students’ learning activities. There are two main types of students’ learning activities: behavioral engagement and psychological engagement. As far as online teaching is concerned, behavioral engagement are explicit behaviors taken by learners during learning process, such as clicking on the screen, participating in online discussions, inputting words in text boxes, drawing mind maps and so on. Psychological engagement is the psychological activities that learners take to achieve their learning goals during the learning period, such as guiding their attention to the relevant important content, establishing the relationship between new and original knowledge, constructing the internal logical relationship of new knowledge, and so on. Online teaching should adopt corresponding strategies to trigger students’ psychological engagement. For example, a strategy which is supported by research and has obvious effect to trigger students’ psychological engagement is to embed questions that can be answered by clicking in the content that teachers send to students.


Dr. Wang then proposed three strategies that enable online teaching to adapt to the limited capacity of students’ working memory:

1. The first strategy is the “elimination strategy”, which refers to the deletion of words, pictures, animation, video, audio and other content that have nothing to do with the teaching objectives in online teaching.

2. The second strategy is the “separation strategy”, which means to divide the longer teaching videos into a number of shorter clips and present them one by one.

3. The third strategy is the “unloading strategy”, which requires students to take notes when watching continuous live videos, to “unload” the relevant online teaching content to external storage media, so as to reduce the burden of temporarily storing and processing information in working memory.


Dr. Wang finally concluded that students’ original knowledge base affects the effect of their online learning. What’s more, students are suitable for different kinds of online teaching: online teaching is suitable for students with a solid foundation, it may not be suitable for students with a weak foundation, and vice versa.


He particularly noted that the above-mentioned online teaching strategies, such as eliminating, separating, unloading, asking questions, and reducing the requirements of behavioral engagement activities, should be under the same premise: the learners are beginners, they have a weak knowledge base in the online teaching content they are learning, so they need to adopt these strategies to help them learn new knowledge. If the students’ original knowledge base has been greatly improved with the deepening of their study, the learning effect of the above-mentioned teaching strategies may be reduced or even disappeared. These strategies cannot be regarded as fixed secrets and mechanically implemented in disregard of students’ knowledge base.