Abstract

Due to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, students have increasingly begun to learn virtually, often watching online lectures. Some students might believe that turning up the volume on those lectures can enhance their learning efficiency, and this assumption is supported by a 2009 study (Rhodes & Castel, 2009) where students were shown to have higher judgments of learning (JOLs) for louder words compared to quiet words. I designed a within-participants experiment under two conditions to study the real effect of louder audio on learning by making the participants watch videos at different volumes, answer several questions regarding their JOLs, and complete one quiz for each video. The final data suggest that louder audio had significant influence neither on students’ JOLs nor on their assessment performance. Although the online participants’ assessment performance presented a similar result as that in the Rhodes and Castel study, the finding of no influence of volume on JOLs contradicts Rhodes and Castel.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.