METHODS AND TECHNIQUES The Consequences of Including Seductive Details During Lecture

When text passages include seductive details (i.e., interesting, tan-gentially 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 stu-dents reading the same material without seductive details. To de-termine whether including seductive details during lecture had a similar effect, students listened to a recorded lecture that either con-tained or did not contain seductive details and took a test on the ma-terial. As predicted, students who heard a lecture containing seductive details recalled significantly fewer main points and pro-vided significantly fewer acceptable problem-solving solutions than students who heard the lecture without seductive details. These re-sults suggest that lectures should not include seductive details. Do teachers sometimes worry that their lectures are bor-ing? If so, what do they do about it? In an attempt to captur