Impact of Camera Use on Learning Outcomes in the Virtual Classroom : Evidence from a Field Experiment

An emerging body of experimental psychology literature suggests that remote work is associated with virtual meeting fatigue and that the camera that is a salient feature of virtual meetings is a leading cause of this fatigue, with a more pronounced effect on women and employees with shorter tenure (Bailenson, 2021; Bennett et al., 2021; Shockley et al., 2021). This strand of the literature that draws from self-presentation theory argues that videoconferencing is a cognitively exhausting activity. We use a field experimental design to examine how camera use in virtual classroom affects learning outcomes. We find that it has no effect on immediate recall of knowledge in an online synchronous economics class, including female students and students with lower class standing