The Consequences of Including Seductive Details during Lecture

When text passages include seductive details (i.e., interesting, tangentially related adjuncts that are irrelevant to the lesson), students perform worse on recall (Garner, Gillingham, & White, 1989) and problem-solving tests (Harp & Mayer, 1997, 1998) than students reading the same material without seductive details. To determine whether including seductive details during lecture had a similar effect, students listened to a recorded lecture that either contained or did not contain seductive details and took a test on the material. As predicted, students who heard a lecture containing seductive details recalled significantly fewer main points and provided significantly fewer acceptable problem-solving solutions than students who heard the lecture without seductive details. These results suggest that lectures should not include seductive details.