The Impact of Observing a Video-Based Student Model on Learning

Understanding the impact of observing a video-based student model demonstrating study behaviors on learning might help educators utilize videos as instructional strategies to promote students’ academic motivation and benefit learning. This study evaluated two competing hypotheses on whether watching videos consisting of a studying person and non-human studying-related visual cues will increase learners’ performance through the lens of modeling and the seductive details effect. A 2 (Human: presence, absence) × 2 (Cues: decorated, plain) randomized factorial design was conducted on Amazon MTurk. A modeling effect was not found in this study. However, support for the seductive details effect hypothesis was found in which observing a human was seductive because indirectly human behavior without specific ties to the learning task in a video appears to cause distraction from learning and trigger a seductive details effect.