The Road to understanding in lecture listening

Recent technological advances offer test developers the opportunity to develop new assessment tasks which closely replicate behaviour in real-world domains such as academic lectures, thus achieving greater ecological and cognitive validity. However, developing new task types that demand the integration of auditory and textual information relies on understanding the relationship between what is said and what is written on the slides, and how students integrate these two streams of information.

With a dual focus, this study first examined the relationship between the lecturer's speech and the textual information on the lecture slides before investigating the processes students use to integrate these two streams of information to develop an understanding of the lecture content.