More tips from Craig Barton
Video transcript
hello i’m craig barton and welcome to the tips for teachers video now there’s a principle from the cognitive theory of multimedia learning called the coherence principle and it states this people learn more deeply when extraneous material is excluded rather than included now that may seem like the most obvious thing you’ve ever heard in your life but i’ll tell you what it kind of been obvious to me because for about 12 years my teaching was rammed full of extraneous material now there was a fascinating study published in 2020 and i love the title of this a metro analysis of the seductive details effect i became aware of this study when robco tweeted about it just take a moment just to read rob’s tweet there now i think many teachers fall into this trap and i’m going to put my hand up because i certainly do we include things perhaps on our slides or our worksheets or within our questions that are designed to engage students a little bit quirky stuff here and there but what they may be doing is having a detrimental effect on their learning because as students or anybody we’ve only got a limited amount of attention we want as much of that attention to be dedicated to the thing that’s going to help us learn and understand if any of that starts drifting off into these seductive details then potentially we have problems because we have less attention to dedicate to the thing that’s going to make a difference so as a result of this there’s kind of a key principle that i i try and stick to and i’m going to break it down into four sections and show you some examples so the first is i always think to myself what is visible to students is what they’re likely to attend to if they can see something they’ve got to process it it’s got to take up some of their attention or they’ve got to effortfully ignore it they’ve got to see it realize it’s not relevant and disregard it but that process isn’t costless that deciding what’s relevant and not is effortful and it saps attention and if we follow this logic through what students attend to is what they’re likely to remember from the work of daniel willingham so as a result we’ve got to be so careful about what’s visible to our students so i’m going to give you a few examples now now the first one is painful for me because i cannot believe i did this but many many years ago i wrote an ebook of notes and examples for my math students and i published it on my mr barton maths website i’ll tell you what it still exists out there but i’m tempted to take this down because this does not make me look good right brace yourself you’re about to see a page from that ebook ready i mean i literally don’t know what i was thinking i don’t know what this alien’s uh doing what role he’s got to play in the mata uh we’ve got an arrow pointing here we’ve also got loads of different colors and underline and bold i mean what’s the priority here do we look at the red bold or is the kind of green not bold but underlying more important it’s terrible full of seductive details that aren’t particularly you well they’re not useful at all but students have got to either look at this alien and either they start thinking about the ailing which isn’t ideal or they’ve got to look at it and think is that alien relevant no probably not and then go back to the text but that’s an effortful process so it’s it’s bad this is just terrible there’s not much fixing to that but i want to end with a few more subtle examples um of this so this is an interesting one so this is a maths example but i’m convinced that this lesson transfers across just take a moment perhaps just to read question one so you can see here we’ve got a maths uh question it’s to do with kind of ratio and and sharing but we’ve got seductive details woven in there we’ve got princess bubble gums involved the ice king it’s all kicking off now one point i want to make really clear here is that certainly what i’m not saying is that these questions are useless because we need our students certainly as math mathematicians and i assume this is true of other subjects to be able to problem-solve in the sense that they need to be to able to identify what’s relevant and what’s irrelevant within a certain question so question one is a good question the point i’m trying to make here is often as teachers we use questions like this early on in the learning process when students are novice learners when they’re not completely fluent in the concept of ratio in this example so therefore we’re asking them to sift through what’s relevant to what’s irrelevant when they’re not secure with the actual core material themselves and i think that’s when these seductive details really become harmful because if we’ve got a student who we really need to think hard about ratio and yet they’re thinking about princess bubblegum and the ice king and thinking is that relevant then i think questions like this become problematic so move these further down further along the learning episodes when students are more secure with the basics and then we ask questions like this not so they can practice the basics but so they can practice sifting through relevance and irrelevance whereas i think what teachers often do myself included is hope you get a kind of two-for-one deal with questions like this that students will learn the basics and learn to sift through relevance and irrelevance but what i think happens is the seductive details become particularly enticing when you’re a novice learner i’m going to end with perhaps the subtlest example now this is from a maths author who i think is absolutely fantastic pixie or danielle is she’s she’s known in the real world and she produces incredible slides and and i was i was tasmath’s advisor for about 12 years so i got to see hundreds of powerpoints and shared and what’s really interesting when somebody shares a teacher creates a powerpoint and shares it with a wide audience like danielle does and like many people on tez do they tend to put a load of details in the slide itself and the reason is they want to communicate to other teachers um as much information as possible how the slide should be used and so on and so forth but if you look at this i think we can see the problem straight away if we want students attending to this if this is what we want them focusing on the problem is they’ve got quite a few seductive details around the outside that they need to ignore so my solution to things like this is i mean i’m not a massive fan of learning objectives full stop but that’s that’s for another day um but let’s deal with them first so if we need to get kids to copy them down for whatever reason let’s get them copied down the date and the title and so on and then let’s strip all that away and focus in on the example let’s remove those seductive details and one interesting approach that i quite like as well is we may want to relate this example to one of those learning objectives so what we can do perhaps with a bit of powerpoint animation we can cover up those seductive details and then if i just hover my mouse over here we can click on the learning objectives when they’re relevant and say okay now let’s relate that example to what what the lessons about where does it fit in and so on and so forth so just a reminder that that’s the core principle and the four um kind of ideas behind it and crucially we need to be very careful about what’s visible to our students so what do you make of that have you got seductive details in your lesson can you tweet them a little bit and remove them what would you need to change to make this work for you