On Fri, 13 May 2005, Christopher D. Green went:
I have little doubt that something like this happens to some students sometimes. But almost any sequence of events you'd care to describe happens to some students sometimes. That's why anecdotes are of questionable value as evidence.
Oh, I agree. This is a question that needs empirical investigation.
Now, having looked at the Harp article, I question whether their methods gave a fair shake to the inclusion of seductive details. They explicitly acknowledge that what they did was to introduce tangential or irrelevant "fluff," not fascinating *examples*. Of course that's going to distract students; that isn't news.
They also say: "[S]eductive details confuse readers [or listeners, I assume] as to what a lesson is actually about....If the prior knowledge base around which they are organizing the new material is inappropriate (i.e., irrelevant), then it is unlikely that students will understand the new material."
I always sought to avoid that problem by distributing detailed lecture-outline handouts for my students to follow as I spoke. The students in the Harp study received no such organizational assistance--just four minutes of tape-recorded talk with or without irrelevant factoids distractingly dropped in.
Thought-provoking study. Needs replication and extension with different procedures.
--David Epstein [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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