A Review of Seductive Details in Educational Activities Using Electronic Slide Presentations: Derailing the Learning Process

This review article examines the use of seductive details in nursing education activities. Seductive details are irrelevant images that are placed into educational material. Although seductive details may be found in any type of educational material and at any academic level, this article focuses on the placement of seductive details in electronic slide presentations used in nursing education activities. Educators optimistically place seductive details in educational material to engage learners or provide a momentary break from the presentation. Although engaging the learner is important, educators must use methods that do not derail how the learner's brain remembers information. Added visuals should be relevant to the material needed to be understood. Using seductive details may adversely affect learning by overloading the working memory with extraneous cognitive information, affecting the ability of the learner to create a coherent mental model needed to store a long-term memory. Evidence-based information about seductive detail use is nonexistent in nursing education literature. Professional nurse educators must carefully consider the use of seductive details in electronic slide presentations. [J Contin Educ Nurs. 2023;54(6):261-267.].

Seductive Details in the Flipped Classroom: The Impact of Interesting but Educationally Irrelevant Information on Student Learning and Motivation

In this study, we assessed the impact of providing students with short video clips highlighting the relevance of material they are learning in the genetics classroom to their everyday lives. These interesting but non-learning objective oriented clips, referred to as "seductive details," have been studied extensively in laboratory contexts. In laboratory studies, seductive details have been shown to actually decrease learning, leading some to recommend that any information not directly pertaining to academic learning outcomes be removed from education materials. We aimed to uncover effects of seductive details in an actual college course, in a manner divorced from the confounding variation introduced by instructor-level differences in personality and lecture styles. Our results show that, in a flipped-classroom environment, seductive details do not harm students' content attainment, interest, or perceived learning, but they are memorable. Students with high background knowledge of genetics reported greater learning after watching videos containing seductive details than students who watched equivalent videos without seductive details, but there was no difference in quiz scores between the groups. These results contradict some of the major effects observed throughout decades of studies conducted in artificial psychology laboratory environments and highlight possible affective benefits of instructors using seductive details.

Practical Tips for Integrating Clinical Relevance into Foundational Science Courses

The integration of foundational science and clinical science education is a hallmark of educational reform within the health professions, and an increasing number of pharmacy schools are implementing integrated curricula in professional pharmacy programs. Although the foundational sciences serve as an essential framework for understanding clinical knowledge, instructors may face challenges when integrating clinical science into foundational science courses. Here we present practical learner-centered teaching tips to address these challenges.