Effects of an ego-depletion intervention upon online learning

Abstract

Many educators ask their students to conduct research using online information sources. Such sources vary in trustworthiness and quality and despite conventional wisdom, students are not naturally adept at vetting these sources. Empirical research has shown that successful online learning often requires effortful activities such as self-regulation and epistemic cognition. Frequent exertion of such effort may explain why people report feeling exhausted by the conflicting information sources they encounter online. Such feelings of exhaustion may be akin to ego-depletion, where frequent or excessive acts of self-control make subsequent acts of self-control more difficult to enact. Recent criticisms of the ego-depletion paradigm warrant empirical research with different tasks, such as learning online, but such work is scarce, with a lack of research utilizing both process (i.e., what people do) and product (i.e., what people have learned) measures. Therefore, in this study, we randomly assigned 53 college students to either an ego-depletion or control condition and then asked them to use a computer to learn about a complex topic: single-payer health care models. Despite a rigorous ego-depletion treatment, we found no detectable group differences in terms of either process or product data. Our findings contribute to the ongoing controversy about the replicability of ego-depletion effects, as well as whether and how they affect learning.