{"id":6961,"date":"2023-02-12T08:00:26","date_gmt":"2023-02-12T13:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/braindevs.net\/blog\/blog\/?p=6961"},"modified":"2023-03-10T20:25:23","modified_gmt":"2023-03-11T01:25:23","slug":"seductive-details-meet-retrieval-practice-a-match-made-in-cognitive-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/seductive-details-meet-retrieval-practice-a-match-made-in-cognitive-heaven\/","title":{"rendered":"“Seductive Details” meet “Retrieval Practice”: A Match Made in Cognitive Heaven"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a common problem: your job today is to teach a\u00a0boring topic<\/strong>. (You<\/em> don’t think it’s boring, but your students<\/em> always complain…)<\/p>\n

What’s a teacher to do?<\/p>\n

One plausible strategy: You might enliven this topic in some entertaining way.<\/p>\n

You’ve got a funny video,<\/p>\n

or a clever cartoon,<\/p>\n

or a GREAT anecdote about a colleague’s misadventure.<\/p>\n

Okay, so this video\/cartoon\/anecdote isn’t one of today’s learning objectives. BUT: it just might capture your students’ interest and help them pay attention.<\/p>\n

However tempting, this strategy does create its own problems. We’ve got lots of research showing that these intriguing-but-off-topic details can get in the way of learning<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That is: students r\"Two<\/a>emember the\u00a0seductive details<\/strong> (as they’re known in the research literature), but less of the actual content<\/strong> we want them to know.<\/p>\n

Womp womp.<\/p>\n

Some time ago, I wrote about<\/a> a meta-analysis<\/a> showing that — yup — seductive details ACTUALLY DO interfere with learning: especially for beginners, especially in shorter lessons.<\/p>\n

What could we do to fix this problem? If we can’t use our anecdotes and cartoons, do we just have to bore our students?<\/p>\n

“Right-Sized” Retrieval Practice<\/h2>\n

Here’s one approach we might try: right-sized retrieval practice<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What does “right-sized” mean? Here goes:<\/p>\n

One retrieval practice strategy is a\u00a0brain dump<\/em>. The instructions sounds something like this: “write down everything you remember about today’s grammar lesson.”<\/p>\n

Another retrieval practice strategy calls for more specific questions<\/em>: “what’s the differenece between a gerund and a participle?” “How might a participle create a dangling modifier?”<\/p>\n

A group of scholars in Germany studied this hypothesis:<\/p>\n

If teachers use the brain dump<\/em> approach, students will remember the seductive detail — and it will become a part of their long-term memory.<\/p>\n

If, on the other hand, teachers ask specific questions<\/em>, students will remember the important ideas of the lesson — and not consolidate memory of the seductive detail.<\/p>\n

They ran a straightforward study, considering a topic close to every teacher’s heart: coffee.<\/p>\n

100+ college students in Germany read a lengthy passage on coffee: information about the coffee plant, its harvesting, its preparation, and its processing.<\/p>\n

Half of them read a version including fun-but-extraneous information. For instance: do you know coffee was discovered?<\/p>\n

Turns out: goat herders noticed that their goats ate the coffee beans and then did a kind of happy dance. Those herders wondered: could we get the same happy effects? Thus was born today’s coffee industry…<\/p>\n

Remembering the GOAT<\/h2>\n

After reading these coffee passages — with or without seductive details — students answered retrieval practice questions.<\/p>\n

Some got a “brain dump” promt: “What do you remember about coffee?”<\/p>\n

Others got the specific questions: “What harvesting methods do you remember, and how do they differ?”<\/p>\n

So, what effect did those\u00a0specific questions<\/em> have on memory of\u00a0seductive details<\/em> one week later?<\/p>\n

Sure enough, as the researchers had hypothesized, students who answered specific retrieval practice questions remembered MORE of the lesson’s meaningful content.<\/p>\n

And, they remembered LESS (actually, NONE) of the seductive details. (Of course, the details get complicated, but this summary captures the main idea.)<\/p>\n

BOOM.<\/p>\n

So, what’s a classroom teacher to do?<\/p>\n

As is so often the case, we should remember that researchers ISOLATE variables and teachers COMBINE variables.<\/p>\n

We always have to think about many (many!) topics at once, while research typically tries to find out the importance of exactly one thing.<\/p>\n

Putting all these ideas together, I’d recommend the following path:<\/p>\n

If I have to teach a topic my students find dull, I can indeed include some seductive details (Ha ha! Goats!) to capture their interest — as long as I conclude that lesson with some highly specific<\/strong> retrieval practice questioning.<\/em><\/p>\n

And, based on this\u00a0earlier post on seductive details<\/a>, this extra step will be especially important if the lesson is short<\/em>, or the students are beginners<\/em> with this topic.<\/p>\n

TL;DR<\/h2>\n

Seductive details can capture students’ interest, but also distract them from the important topics of the lesson.<\/p>\n

To counteract this problem, teachers should plan for retriveal practice including specific questions — not just a brain dump.<\/p>\n

\n

By the way: I first heard about this “retrieval practice vs. seductive details” study from Bradley Busch (Twitter: @BradleyKBusch) and Jade Pearce (Twitter: @PearceMrs). If you’re not familiar with their work, be sure to look them up!<\/p>\n

\n

Eitel, A., Endres, T., & Renkl, A. (2022). Specific questions during retrieval practice are better for texts containing seductive details.\u00a0Applied Cognitive Psychology<\/i>,\u00a036<\/i>(5), 996-c1008.<\/p>\n

Sundararajan, N., & Adesope, O. (2020). Keep it coherent: A meta-analysis of the seductive details effect.\u00a0Educational Psychology Review<\/i>,\u00a032<\/i>(3), 707-734.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s a common problem: your job today is to teach a\u00a0boring topic. (You don’t think it’s boring, but your students always complain…) What’s a teacher to do? One plausible strategy: You might enliven this topic in some entertaining way. You’ve got a funny video, or a clever cartoon, or a GREAT anecdote about a colleague’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":6966,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[15,12],"class_list":["post-6961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lb-blog","tag-classroom-advice","tag-retrieval-practice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6961"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7010,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6961\/revisions\/7010"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}