Last night I watched a fascinating program on the BBC about physicist Richard Feynman.  Whilst I’d obviously heard a lot about his work and talents, what I wasn’t aware of was how engaging he was as a teacher, and indeed human being.

A comment from a former student of Feynman’s stuck out however.  He said that he was so engaging that it often left you feeling like you knew the incredibly difficult topics being discussed better than you actually did.

It got me thinking about the modern world, and how platforms such as TED have been bringing insights to our screens for the last decade.  The talks nearly always feature incredibly engaging individuals, often talking about inspiring work.  Does the byte sized format give us a false sense of understanding though?

Some recent research has delved into the issue to explore whether engaging presenters give us undue confidence in our abilities.

The researchers asked participants to study a one minute video of a science lecture.  Half of them were shown a video with a confident and eloquent lecturer, whilst the other half had a lecturer that was far less polished.

Afterwards, each participant was asked to rate how well they believed they would do on a test of the content just ten minutes after seeing the clip.

Interestingly, the people who had seen the smooth performer thought they would do much better than those who had seen the poor performer.

The reality was however that both groups did exactly the same in the test that followed.  In other words, the first groups confidence was misplaced.

To further test the hypothesis, a second study was undertaken.  As before, participants were divided between the smooth academic and the fumbling one.  This time however the two groups were allowed as much time as they wanted to review the script before taking the test.

A fascinating difference emerged.  Both groups devoted the same amount of time to studying the script, but only those who watched the fumbling professor showed an improvement in their understanding.  It suggests that they used this time better to fill in any gaps in their knowledge.

“Learning from someone else – whether it is a teacher, a peer, a tutor, or a parent – may create a kind of ‘social metacognition’,” the researchers said, “in which judgments are made based on the fluency with which someone else seems to be processing information. The question students should ask themselves is not whether it seemed clear when someone else explained it. The question is, ‘can I explain it clearly?'”.

Suffice to say there is a note of caution involved, as the clips were only one minute long, but it does raise an interesting question.  We have already seen a rise in so called ‘slacktavism’, whereby people believe simple actions are enough to deliver real change.  Could the likes of TED be heralding a rise in slackucation?

An obvious limitation of the study is the brevity of the science lecture and the fact it was on video. It remains to be seen whether this result would replicate in a more realistic situation after a longer lecture. Also, in real life, there may be costs to a fumbling lecture style that weren’t picked up in this study, such as students mind wandering and skipping class.