Adding the newest YouTube animal sensation, background music or other pieces of irrelevant entertainment to a lesson plan isn’t a good idea if teachers want students to retain important information, a new study shows.
Washington State University (WSU) researchers analyzed 58 studies involving more than 7,500 students and found that teachers who taught with “seductive details,” info that’s interesting but completely irrelevant, were actually hindering student performance when it came time to measure progress in class.
“There are multiple hypotheses on why that happens, but the simplest is that students’ attention is now diverted toward that irrelevant information and they’re spending too much time trying to understand what that seductive detail is instead of the content matter,” said Kripa Sundar, lead author on the WSU paper, in a news release.
The effect was even worse when seductive details were placed next to informative and relevant diagrams, or if they were constantly in every presentation with learning material six to 12 minutes long, Sundar and co-author Olusola Adesope said. They were also more detrimental to students on paper versus digital formats and more prominently used in subjects like social studies and natural sciences.
A majority of the included studies were conducted in a class type setup in psychology labs, Sundar said.
“This does not mean that learning shouldn’t be fun,” Sundar added. “We just might need to exert a little more effort into thinking how we can make the learning activity itself a lot more engaging and interesting in a way that contributes toward the educational objective.”
