Inserting brief quiz questions into an online lecture can boost learning and may reduce racial achievement gaps, even when students are tuning in remotely in a distracting environment. That’s a main finding of our recent research published in Communications Psychology. With co-authors Dahwi Ahn, Hymnjyot Gill and Karl Szpunar, we present evidence that adding mini-quizzes into an online lecture in science, technology, engineering or mathematics – collectively known as STEM – can boost learning, especially for Black students. In our study, we included over 700 students from two large public universities and five two-year community colleges across the U.S. and Canada. All the students watched a 20-minute video lecture on a STEM topic. Each lecture was divided into four 5-minute segments, and following each segment, the students either answered four brief quiz questions or viewed four slides reviewing the content they’d just seen.
