Student engagement is often promoted as a goal for design interventions in textbooks, supplementary materials, and activities or demonstrations. While a worthy goal in general, research indicates that interventions or design features intended to engage students do not necessarily encourage effective processing or learning gains. This symposium presentation will begin by reviewing collaborative work on chemistry visualizations with the honoree, Dr. Vickie Williamson. In one study, we found that static visualizations were often presented in textbooks as decorative images without instructional support. This was true despite a demonstrated need for practice and representational competence when students use these visualizations. In another study we found that engaging, concrete, dynamic visualizations can sometimes distract learners from more relevant particulate-level animations. Next, related text-based research from outside the chemistry domain will be presented. In one set of studies, we found that including interesting, but irrelevant, details in a text about lightning and tornadoes distracted readers from the relevant content. And this distraction was maintained even when effective interventions (i.e. retrieval practice) were added. In a more recent set of studies, we compared memory for psychological concepts after reading interesting anecdotes vs. more “boring” descriptions of experiments. While students enjoyed the anecdotes, and believed they learned well from them, students remembered information from the experimental texts better. In sum, visualizations and other interventions that create concrete, engaging, or interesting materials are not necessarily effective, and are sometimes counter-productive. Research from Dr. Williamson and others has demonstrated that these interventions are useful when they facilitate conceptual thinking about ideas that might otherwise be inaccessible. Finally, cognitive frameworks that may account for these effects will be discussed.

Limitations of engagement as a goal for design: Visualizations and beyond

249th National Meeting (2015)

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