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We conducted a ManyClasses study in 30 different classes, where student participants (n = 1,571) were assigned to watch two online lecture videos, and one of these videos (order randomized) was immediately preceded by ungraded multiple-choice prequestions, with no feedback or answers shown. In the laboratory, decades of research have observed that prequestions reliably improve learning from subsequent instruction when compared to instruction not preceded by prequestions, but evidence in authentic education settings has been elusive. The current experiment, embedded in authentic classes ranging from sixth grade through senior-level college, with class-specific videos and questions created by teachers, confirmed that prequestions improve average student learning performance, measured by delayed classroom assessments that included the prequestions. Furthermore, we examined how prequestions affected students’ interactions with the online videos. Despite the generalizable average benefit of prequestions for student learning, we found that prequestions also caused some students to disengage, skipping the assigned video entirely. Among students who did watch the videos, there was no increase in the amount viewed after answering prequestions compared to videos with no prequestions. These findings lead us to suggest that prequestions do not increase attention to the subsequent learning materials, but rather, prequestions cause learners to activate a relevant mental model in advance of instruction. This account is corroborated by the finding that answering prequestions correctly was a significant moderator of the benefits of prequestions, suggesting that the prequestions, while beneficial on average, may cause a rich-get-richer scenario when implemented in authentic education settings.
