Does triggering learners’ interest make them overconfident?

Abstract

Educators often use stories, humor, surprise, images, or other ploys to catch students' interest. This form of interest, often called "situational interest" because of how it is triggered by contextual cues, can facilitate learning to some degree. Yet it also may carry risks. This article proposes one such potential risk: flawed metacognition, in the form of inflated judgments of learning (JOLs) and overconfident estimates of future performance (calibration bias). Two experiments tested this hypothesis. In each, college students (Ns = 201, 196) read passages on a novel topic (the physics of lighEDU-2020-0310 tning in Study 1; the Hare Krishna organization in Study 2), crafted to be relatively dull or interesting. They then reported their interest, JOLs, and performance estimates before completing a test of their topic knowledge. Otherwise, their methods differed in several ways, such as how situational interest was induced and how performance was measured. Despite those differences, the findings from each study confirmed that situational interest inflated participants' JOLs and promoted overconfident performance estimates. Furthermore, Study 2 showed that those inaccurate metacognitive judgments affect studying decisions; due to their inflated JOLs, participants allocated less of their limited time for restudy to the fun passages. Potential moderators are considered, as are implications for interest theory, for metacognition theory, and for educators more generally. Educational Impact and Implications StatementEngaging students has long been a major priority for educators and students alike, compelling teachers to find ways to trigger and maintain students' "situational interest" through humor, animation, and other ploys. We explored a possible metacognitive risk to those ploys. In two experiments, we found that raising students' interest (relative to a control group) in novel topics made them overestimate how well they learned the topics and how well they could later answer questions on these topics. This overconfidence, in turn, convinced them to avoid studying the fun topics when considering which topics to revisit for additional study. The findings raise intriguing implications for educators about when and how best to trigger students' interest when learning.

The richer, the better? Effects of combining seductive and interpretational visuals in computer‐based learning

“…The literature on learning with visualisations uses different terminologies when discussing interesting but irrelevant pictures. The different terms found in this field include seductive pictures (for recent studies, see e.g., Bender et al, 2021; Senko et al, 2022), decorative pictures (e.g., Lenzner et al, 2013; Schneider et al, 2018), and background images (Chung & Cheon, 2020). Regardless of the inconsistency in the terminology used, all the pictures in this category are aesthetically pleasing but unrelated to the instructional objectives, and are thus believed to distract students' attention (Sanchez & Wiley, 2006), and/or add extraneous load to students' limited working memory capacity (Mayer et al, 2008).…”

Role of Perceived Competence and Task Interest in Learning From Negative Feedback

“…The widely accepted notion of seductive detail effect assumes that interesting but tangential sources (e.g., funny images and interesting stories) can distract students from attending to key concepts, impeding their learning (Harp and Mayer, 1998; for a review, see Rey, 2012). More recently, Senko et al (2021) showed that interesting materials could also inflate students' judgment of learning and lead them to overestimate their performance. That is, more interesting materials can lead to a flawed conception of the student's mastery of the task.…”