The mind is prone to wander from the task at hand about 30% of the time and is an increasing challenge for those using video-based learning.
Given the growing role of educational videos within institutions, there is a need to better understand how learners act when they catch themselves slipping away.
Researchers from Adelaide University's Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning investigated the impact of self-awareness on 53 university students from eight different courses.
Across a two-week period, students watched a combined 26 short videos and recorded every time their thoughts went off task.
The participants reported a total of 317 thought reports, averaging out to three per participant.
"The relationship between mind wandering and learning outcomes may be more nuanced than it initially appears," Research Fellow and Lead Researcher Dr Daniel Ebbert said.
"Having the ability to assess your own cognitive state is known as metacognitive monitoring and is a core component of self-regulated learning."
The study's findings were published open access in the journal Metacognition and Learning.
"Overall, students who scored higher on planning and time management and effort regulation in a survey prior to watching the videos reported less mind wandering," Dr Ebbert said.
"The findings in our study could be attributed to learners planning how to approach a video-watching task and determining how much effort to exert, thereby delaying the onset of frequent mind wandering and enabling longer video-watching sessions."
The study also examined the number of times students went back and rewatched the videos.
"When learners become aware of their mind wandering, they might adjust their learning behaviour, like rereading a piece of text or rewinding the video to catch what they might have missed," Dr Ebbert said.
"In addition to monitoring the number of times the learners recorded their mind wandering, we measured whether students chose to rewind videos following mind wandering, which would have indicated active self-regulation.
"Our study identified 15 instances, by 10 participants, where they rewound the video to see content they thought they had missed.
"The learners may not have consciously evaluated the situation and continued learning, or they did evaluate it and chose not to react to their mind wandering.
"This poses some interesting questions for future research which could explore whether learners need to be taught how to respond when they realise they are mind wandering, or whether such reactive behaviour naturally develops as part of a learner’s self-regulated learning skills."