| Our Current Projects |
Below you can find some of the projects we are currently working on at our lab. You can read about the topics themselves, the kind of work we do for the projects, and who to contact if you’d like to learn more about it. As a reminder, you can potentially join one of our current projects or even start your own!
The Usage of Seductive Details in the Classroom
Seductive details are fun or interesting pieces of information, anecdotes, visual or auditory stimuli, or humor that are not directly related to learning outcomes. Previous literature has mostly focused on the impact that seductive details may have on students’ performance in course assessments. However, there is no conclusive evidence as to whether they are detrimental, neutral, or beneficial for student performance; their effect seems to be highly context-dependent.
Our project goes beyond the traditional scope of seductive details research and instead focuses on other effects they might have. Seductive details can potentially impact a student’s first impressions of the course and instructor, or help promote a more inclusive learning environment. To answer such an encompassing question, we envisioned this project in three stages.
The first stage focused on a student survey to measure their attitudes towards a fictional course and instructor. We utilized multiple syllabi with varying usages of seductive details. Our current stage focuses on understanding the instructors’ motivations for including seductive details in their courses. We aim for our last stage to be a classroom intervention on seductive detail usage based on the findings from our first two phases.
- Who to contact: Carlos Landaverde and Mariam Morcus.
- Some of our work:
- Short Presentation at the SABER 2022 conference, which showcases the results from the first phase of the project.
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Poster for the SABER West 2023 conference, displaying initial data collection results for the second phase of the project.
- Reference papers:
- Maloy, J., Fries, L., Laski, F. A., & Ramirez, G. (2019). Seductive details in the Flipped Classroom: The impact of interesting but educationally irrelevant information on student learning and motivation. CBE- Life Sciences Education, 18(3), ar42. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.19-01-0004
- Buchert, S., Laws, E. L., Apperson, J. M., & Bregman, N. J. (2008). First impressions and professor reputation: influence on student evaluations of instruction. Social Psychology of Education, 11(4), 397–408. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-008-9055-1
- Rey, G. D. (2012). A review of research and a meta-analysis of the seductive detail effect. Educational Research Review, 7(3), 216–237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2012.05.003