Overcoming overconfidence in learning from video-recorded lectures: Implications of interpolated testing for online education

• Learners were generally overconfident about how well they learned from a video-recorded statistics lectures.
• Interpolated testing served to boost actual performance to the level of predicted performance.
• Test questions presented only at the end of the lecture served to lower unrealistic judgments of learning.
• Interpolated testing represents a particularly effective approach to produce high levels of predicted and actual performance.

The video-recorded lecture represents a central feature of most online learning platforms. Nonetheless, little is known about how to best structure video-recorded lectures in order to optimize learning. Here, we focused on the tendency for high school and college students to be overconfident in their learning from video-recorded modules, and demonstrated that testing could be used to effectively improve the calibration between predicted and actual performance. Notably, interpolating a lecture with repeated tests helped to boost actual performance to the level of predicted performance, whereas a single test following the lecture served to lower unrealistic judgments of learning. The value of improving performance to match predictions of learning and other avenues for future research regarding meta-comprehension of video-recorded lectures is discussed.