Interplay between prior knowledge and communication mode on teaching effectiveness: Interpersonal neural synchronization as a neural marker

Abstract

Teacher–student interaction allows students to combine prior knowledge with new information to develop new knowledge. It is widely understood that both communication mode and students' knowledge state contribute to the teaching effectiveness (i.e., higher students' scores), but the nature of the interplay of these factors and the underlying neural mechanism remain unknown. In the current study, we manipulated the communication modes (face-to-face [FTF] communication mode/computer-mediated communication [CMC] mode) and prior knowledge states (with vs. without) when teacher–student dyads participated in a teaching task. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, the brain activities of both the teacher and student in the dyads were recorded simultaneously. After teaching, perceived teacher–student interaction and teaching effectiveness were assessed. The behavioral results demonstrated that, during teaching with prior knowledge, FTF communication improved students' academic performance, as compared with CMC. Conversely, no such effect was found for teaching without prior knowledge. Accordingly, higher task-related interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) in the left prefrontal cortex (PFC) was found in the FTF teaching condition with prior knowledge. Such INS mediated the relationship between perceived interaction and students' test scores. Furthermore, the cumulative INS in the left PFC could predict the teaching effectiveness early in the teaching process (around 25–35 s into the teaching task) only in FTF teaching with prior knowledge. These findings provide insight into how the interplay between the communication mode and students’ knowledge state affects teaching effectiveness. Moreover, our findings suggest that INS could be a possible neuromarker for dynamic evaluation of teacher–student interaction and teaching effectiveness.

Introduction

In recent years, technology has been widely integrated into education, which has led to various teaching styles. (Balakrishnan and Gan, 2016; Entwistle, 2013; McKnight et al., 2016). Convincing evidence reveals that in any teaching mode, teaching effectiveness has a great impact on students' success and motivation (Klassen and Tze, 2014). In particular, researchers strive to verify the importance of processing fluency (i.e., one's subjective ease or difficulty of processing information) as an internal cue that educators use to assess teaching effectiveness (Reber and Greifeneder, 2016). Previous studies have shown that both the students' prior knowledge state (Sherman and Frost, 2000) and the communication mode used in teaching (Hantula et al., 2011) could influence the processing fluency between a teacher and students, thereby affecting students' performance (Hantula et al., 2011; Koriat, 2008; Reber and Greifeneder, 2016; Sherman and Frost, 2000). Thus, educators must understand how these factors affect teaching effectiveness and then translate this understanding into practice when designing a teaching curriculum.

Teaching is a dynamic social interaction during which active communication between the teacher and students results in continuous transfer and feedback of information (Watanabe et al., 2013). Behavioral studies have revealed that face-to-face (FTF) communication and computer-mediated communication (CMC, or online course), as two different modes of communication, exert different influences on teacher–student interactions (Shalom et al., 2015; Tichavsky et al., 2015). The FTF mode involves immediacy (Frymier and Houser, 2000; Miller et al., 2014) and is enriched in nonverbal cues (Furnham and Chamorro-Premuzic, 2005) that ensure a good quality of teacher–student interaction (Mazer et al., 2007). In contrast, immediacy and nonverbal cues are absent or negligible in the CMC mode (Noel-Levitz., 2011). Moreover, Hantula et al. noted that FTF communication involves a higher degree of behavior synchronicity, which may allow individuals to interact with one another rapidly, facilitating the fluency of the interaction, as compared to the CMC mode (Hantula et al., 2011). It has also been reported that the fluency of the interaction between teachers and students is associated with high student grades (Rimm-Kaufman et al., 2015), growth in cognitive or intellectual skills (Kim, 2010), and gains in academic self-concept (Cole, 2011). These findings suggest that students would perform better with FTF communication mode than with CMC mode teaching.

However, processing of information with prior knowledge and experience strengthens processing fluency (Sherman and Frost, 2000), and is also positively related to students' performance (Leahy and Sweller, 2005; Yang et al., 2018) as well as problem-solving efficiency (Rittle-Johnson et al., 2009). Additionally, a previous study demonstrated that prior knowledge could enhance communication effectiveness between teachers and students in the FTF lecture task, by facilitating head nodding and mutual gaze convergence, as compared to teaching in the absence of prior knowledge (Thepsoonthorn et al., 2016). Other studies have explored the effects of prior knowledge on CMC mode; however, the conclusions are inconsistent. Kennedy et al. found that prior knowledge could improve students' performance in the CMC mode (Kennedy et al., 2015). On the other hand, another study indicated that prior knowledge had no impact on students’ performance in an online course (Wells, 2000). These differences may result from distinct teaching situations, including teaching contents, organization forms, and evaluation methods. These different factors make it difficult to directly compare the exact role of prior knowledge in different communication modes. To clarify this issue, our study aimed to explore the influence of prior knowledge on teaching effectiveness via different communication modes as well as to elucidate the phydiological basis of this infuence.

Thus, in this study, we compared teacher–student interaction and students’ performance under conditions involving different prior knowledge states and communication modes by adopting a “two-person neuroscience” (2 PN) approach, also known as hyperscanning. As a suitable conceptual and methodological framework for studying the neural basis of social interactions, hyperscanning focuses on dyads rather than individuals (Hari and Kujala, 2009). By adopting this emerging technique, many studies have demonstrated that interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) can be a neuromarker of various interpersonal interactions, including simple action coordination (Cui et al., 2012; Holper et al., 2012; Hu et al., 2017) and complex social communication (Jiang et al., 2012, 2015; Stolk et al., 2014). Increased INS was consistently found in some social brain regions, especially the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) (Cheng et al., 2015; Hu et al., 2017; Lu et al., 2018; Zheng et al., 2018). The PFC is particularly related to attention (Adolphs, 2014), planning (Kaller et al., 2011) as well as information comparisons and integrations of self and others (Zhu et al., 2018), while the rTPJ is more closely related to theory of mind and self–other distinction processes (Carter and Huettel, 2013). In addition, several studies, by using a functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)-based hyperscanning approach, have confirmed that successful knowledge transmission and adequate teaching interactions could be accompanied by significant INS in the PFC and rTPJ (Holper et al., 2013; Pan et al., 2018; Zheng et al., 2018). Thus, based on these previous findings, PFC and rTPJ were selected as regions of interest in our current study.

In this study, we aimed to provide neurobiological evidence for the processing fluency theory in terms of INS, using the fNIRS-based hyperscanning technique. We manipulated the communication modes (FTF vs. CMC) and prior knowledge states (with vs. without) when teacher–student dyads participated in a teaching task. Neural activities were simultaneously recorded in both the PFC and rTPJ during teaching tasks, based on the previous evidence on teaching (Holper et al., 2013; Takeuchi et al., 2016; Zheng et al., 2018). We hypothesized that teaching with prior knowledge would lead to higher students' scores in FTF mode compared to CMC teaching mode. Such better performance should be associated with stronger INS in the PFC and rTPJ, and thus we hypothesized that there would be a positive correlation between INS enhancement and students’ scores under the FTF teaching condition with prior knowledge.