Acoustical measurement of the intuitive understanding effect in lecture education

Abstract

Lecture is one of the most fundamental and traditional education methods. Especially in the initial education of freshmen in university engineering courses, its role becomes more important. A learner's understanding in lecture differs from an essential understanding mastered systematically by self-consciousness. It is defined as intuitive understanding. It becomes a motivation for the essential understanding and correlates strongly with their attitudes in lecture. Their whispering in lecture is caused by lack of attention or concentration. It is considered that their whispering correlates strongly with the intuitive understanding. This paper describes trial measurements to acquire knowledge about the state and situation of learners' intuitive understanding by measuring the hum of their whispering in crowded lectures. The hum was represented as an amplitude probability density distribution (APDD) of the time series acoustical signal recorded by a microphone and its time transition. We presumed a state of their whispering from the forms of the APDDs and a situation from the time transition of the maximum peak values of the differential distributions (DD) of the APDDs. The maximum peak values of the DDs of the APDDs are inversely proportional to the loudness of their whispering. Comparing these data with the learners' self-estimation for each lecture contents, it was confirmed that the less learners could obtain an intuitive understanding of a lecture content, the more noisy their whispering became with progression of the lecture. From these results, we confirmed that it is possible to acquire the situation of their intuitive understanding by using their whispering. One direction for estimation of lecture education was shown by the objective measurement of learners' intuitive understanding.