Editorial: Harmful or helpful to learning? The impact of seductive details on learning and instruction

A Review of Seductive Details in Educational Activities Using Electronic Slide Presentations: Derailing the Learning Process

This review article examines the use of seductive details in nursing education activities. Seductive details are irrelevant images that are placed into educational material. Although seductive details may be found in any type of educational material and at any academic level, this article focuses on the placement of seductive details in electronic slide presentations used in nursing education activities. Educators optimistically place seductive details in educational material to engage learners or provide a momentary break from the presentation. Although engaging the learner is important, educators must use methods that do not derail how the learner's brain remembers information. Added visuals should be relevant to the material needed to be understood. Using seductive details may adversely affect learning by overloading the working memory with extraneous cognitive information, affecting the ability of the learner to create a coherent mental model needed to store a long-term memory. Evidence-based information about seductive detail use is nonexistent in nursing education literature. Professional nurse educators must carefully consider the use of seductive details in electronic slide presentations. [J Contin Educ Nurs. 2023;54(6):261-267.].

Inconsistent seduction: Addressing confounds and methodological issues in the study of the seductive detail effect

INTRODUCTION

The inclusion of interesting but irrelevant details in instructional materials may interfere with recall and application of the core content. Although this seductive detail effect is well researched, recent research highlights factors that may influence the effect size.

OBJECTIVES

The current study discusses confounds and methodological issues in the study of seductive details and outlines strategies for overcoming them. These practices were then applied in a study that examined the role of learning objectives on the seductive detail effect.

METHODS

Seductive details were selected on the basis of interest and importance level and matched for word count and reading level. The 3 × 2 between-subjects design presented 132 undergraduate students with a lesson on plate tectonics; participants completed tests on both recall and transfer.

RESULTS

Results did not reveal a consistent detrimental effect of high-interest details on core content recall and transfer. On the recall test, contrary to expectation, the seductive detail effect obtained only when objectives were provided. A similar pattern emerged on the transfer task.

CONCLUSION

These findings highlight the difficulty of consistently eliciting the seductive detail effect. We discuss outstanding issues that must be addressed in order to develop practical guidelines on the inclusion of seductive details in educational materials.

Transfer: A Review for Biology and the Life Sciences

Transfer of knowledge from one context to another is one of the paramount goals of education. Educators want their students to transfer what they are learning from one topic to the next, between courses, and into the "real world." However, it is also notoriously difficult to get students to successfully transfer concepts. This issue is of particular concern in biology and the life sciences, for which transfer of concepts between disciplines is especially critical to understanding. Students not only struggle to transfer concepts like energy from chemistry to biology but also struggle to transfer concepts like chromosome structures in cell division within biology courses. This paper reviews the current research and understanding of transfer from cognitive psychology. We discuss how learner abilities, taught material, and lesson characteristics affect transfer and provide best practices for biology and life sciences education.