Effect of interest on attention and learning.

Shirey, Larry L.; Reynolds, Ralph E.

doi:10.1037/0022-0663.80.2.159

Cited by 152 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…The main ideas, on the other hand, were probably memorable because of the combined effect of structural importance and interest. Previous research has found that important information is better recalled than unimportant information (e.g., , and interesting information is recalled better than uninteresting information (Anderson et al, 1984;Shirey & Reynolds, 1988). However, the interestingness of the main ideas in this passage was qualitatively different than that of the seductive details.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 44%

Effects of Importance and Interest on Recall of Biographical Text

Wade

Adams

1990

Journal of Reading Behavior

123

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The purpose of this study was to investigate two characteristics of texts-structural importance and text-based interest-that affect what students remember from their reading. Two experiments were conducted. In the first, college students rated sentences in a biographical text for both interest and importance, which were found to be highly related. As a result, four categories of sentences were established: high importance/high interest (the main ideas), high importance/low interest (supporting details), low importance/high interest (seductive details), and low importance/low interest (common events in a person's life history that are unrelated to the main ideas). The second experiment examined the recall of an equivalent group of college students, either immediately after reading the passage or one week later. Interest was found to have a powerful effect on recall for both good and poorer readers. The two categories of information that were best remembered were seductive details and main ideas, both of which had been rated as interesting. Least well remembered were the details supporting the main ideas, which had been rated as important but uninteresting.As a novice eighth-grade social studies teacher, the first author once asked students to tell what was most important to remember from a short biographical sketch of Abraham Lincoln, which they had just read in their textbook. Anticipating answers that would describe aspects of Lincoln's presidency and his role in history, it was a surprise when the first response was, "He was tall."What students consider important and consequently learn may be affected by more than the structural importance of the information in a text. Another factor that may affect learning is the interestingness of the information. Unfortunately, this variable has been largely ignored by researchers until recently. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate how structural importance and text-based interest interact to affect what students remember from their reading. 332 Journal of Reading BehaviorMeyer and Rice (1984) have defined structural importance as the way in which "ideas in a text are interrelated to convey a message to the reader. Some of the ideas in the text are of central importance to the author's message, while others are of less importance. Thus, text structure specifies the logical connections among ideas as well as subordination of some ideas to others" (p. 319). Along similar lines, Kintsch and van Dijk's model (1978) posits two levels of semantic structure of a discourse: the macrostructure and the microstructure. The macrostructure represents the gist of the text; thus, macropropositions are those propositions that subsume all or a large portion of the information. In contrast, the microstructure represents the local level of the text, consisting of individual propositions, or micropropositions, and their relations.Meyer (1979) hypothesizes that skilled readers search out and follow the text's superordinate relational structure, or macrostructure, a...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 44%

Effects of Importance and Interest on Recall of Biographical Text

Wade

Adams

1990

Journal of Reading Behavior

123

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“…The results reported here do not purport that all interesting material should be avoided, for previous research has consistently shown that students learn better when the material is interesting as opposed to when it is not (Hidi & Baird, 1986;Shirey & Reynolds, 1988;Wade, 1992). Perhaps the challenge is to find a way to present science lessons in a way that is interesting, without resorting to the use of entertaining but irrelevant details.…”

Section: Limitations and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 80%

“…For example, while reading about how lightning works, the reader may select and retain seductive information about golfers who were killed by lightning rather than information about the interaction of positive and negative charges within a cloud. This may be because seductive details tend to contain information that requires little attentional effort and is easily understood (Shirey & Reynolds, 1988).…”

Section: The Distraction Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

How seductive details do their damage: A theory of cognitive interest in science learning.

Harp¹,

Mayer²

1998

Journal of Educational Psychology

641

486

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In 4 experiments, students who read expository passages with seductive details (i.e., interesting but irrelevant adjuncts) recalled significantly fewer main ideas and generated significantly fewer problem-solving transfer solutions than those who read passages without seductive details. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3, revising the passage to include either highlighting of the main ideas, a statement of learning objectives, or signaling, respectively, did not reduce the seductive details effect. In Experiment 4, presenting the seductive details at the beginning of the passage exacerbated the seductive details effect, whereas presenting the seductive details at die end of the passage reduced the seductive details effect. The results suggest that seductive details interfere with learning by priming inappropriate schemas around which readers organize the material, rather than by distracting the reader or by disrupting the coherence of the passage.

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“…Thus, the video clips are analogous to seductive details in text passages, which can be defined as interesting but conceptually irrelevant material that is added to a passage to arouse the learner's interest (Garner, Brown, Sanders, & Menke, 1992;Garner, Gillingham, & White, 1989). Research on seductive details in a book-based environment has shown that adding interesting but conceptually irrelevant text to a text passage can reduce the amount of relevant material that the learner remembers (Garner et al, 1992(Garner et al, , 1989Hidi & Baird, 1988;Mohr, Glover, & Ronning, 1984;Shirey & Reynolds, 1988;Wade & Adams, 1990). Similarly, Harp & Mayer (1997 reported that adding interesting but conceptually irrelevant illustrations to a text-andillustrations explanation results in poorer performance on tests of retention and transfer.…”

Section: Figure 1 (Continued)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive constraints on multimedia learning: When presenting more material results in less understanding.

Mayer

Heiser²,

Lonn³

2001

Journal of Educational Psychology

755

488

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In 4 experiments, college students viewed an animation and listened to concurrent narration explaining the formation of lightning. When students also received concurrent on-screen text that summarized (Experiment 1) or duplicated (Experiment 2) the narration, they performed worse on tests of retention and transfer than did students who received no on-screen text. This redundancy effect is consistent with a dual-channel theory of multimedia learning in which adding on-screen text can overload the visual information-processing channel, causing learners to split their visual attention between 2 sources. Lower transfer performance also occurred when the authors added interesting but irrelevant details to the narration (Experiment 1) or inserted interesting but conceptually irrelevant video clips within (Experiment 3) or before the presentation (Experiment 4). This coherence effect is consistent with a seductive details hypothesis in which the inserted video and narration prime the activation of inappropriate prior knowledge as the organizing schema for the lesson.

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Effect of interest on attention and learning.

Cited by 152 publications

References 24 publications

Effects of Importance and Interest on Recall of Biographical Text

Effects of Importance and Interest on Recall of Biographical Text

How seductive details do their damage: A theory of cognitive interest in science learning.

Cognitive constraints on multimedia learning: When presenting more material results in less understanding.

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