I’ll be honest: my sophomore English curriculum doesn’t always inspire my students. I myself find Gerard Manley Hopkins fascinating…but only a rare 15 year-old thinks “Spring and Fall” is the most awesome poem ever. Perhaps I’m not the only teacher who faces this problem.
One obvious solution: make the curriculum relevant–more immediately connected to my students’ lives and interests.
- For my poetry curriculum, I could teach the lyrics to current popular music.
- For my grammar curriculum, I could write practice sentences about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. (Find the direct object and indirect objects in this sentence: “Taylor gave Travis four leftover grammys.”)
If I can make my curriculum emotionally interesting, then perhaps academic interest will follow.
This call for relevance often appears in educational debates. When we research this question, what do we find?
Lightning Strikes
One of the best known studies on this topic considers the potential benefits of enhancing relevance.
Let’s take the topic of lightning formation.
I could ramp up my students’ emotional interest in this topic by adding ideas that pique their curiosity:
- Lightning strikes don’t harm airplanes–so counter-intuitive!
- Lightning can melt sand into cool little sculptures, called “fulgurites”
I could instead focus on their cognitive interest by highlighting key steps in process:
- Violent up- and down-drafts in cumulonimbus clouds move charged water droplets.
- Positively charged ions move to the top of a cloud, while negatively charged ions move to the bottom.
- This charge imbalance, in turn, changes the electrical field on the ground below the cloud…
Researchers Harp and Mayer wanted to know if students benefit when we add emotional interest (“relevance” ) to cognitive interest–the traditional focus of classroom education.
In their study, they had four groups of students read passages about lightning formation.
- Group one read the “cognitive interest only” description, which clearly delineated the steps that lead to lightning strikes. Each step was illustrated by a simple diagram.
- A second group read that description supplemented with “emotionally interesting” sentences: a lightning strike one created a hole in a football player’s helmet and knocked off his shoes!
- A third group read the “cognitive only” description with extra “emotionally interesting” photographs: e.g., lighting passing through an airplane.
- The final group got all three: the base cognitive description PLUS emotional sentences PLUS emotional photos.
To see which blend helped students the most, Harp and Mayer asked them to recall information and to explain it.
- The “recall” question couldn’t have been simpler: “please write down everything you can remember from the passage.”
- The “explain” questions sounded like this:
- “Suppose you see clouds in the sky, but no lightning. Why not?”
- “What does air temperature have to do with lightening?”
By crunching lots of numbers, these researchers could find out how much the added emotional interest sentences and photos increased memory and understanding.
Beyond Helmets and Airplanes
Harp and Mayer hoped that the additions–shocking stories and vibrant photos–would ramp up the students’ emotional interest. Sure enough, the participants in their second study rated those versions twice as “emotionally interesting” as “cognitively interesting.” For the base version, which simply outlines the process of lightning formation, those numbers were reversed.
Having successfully raised emotional interest, how much more learning did Harp and Mayer produce?
Well: they reduced learning. For the “recall” and “explanation” tests, the emotionally interesting additions lowered students’ scores. In fact, adding both piquant sentences and vivid photos reduced understanding more than adding one or the other. (Check out the graphs on p. 98.)
In brief: students learned less from the passages they found more interesting.
The Bigger Pictures
When I write these blog posts, I typically look for the most recent quality study I can find. Today, I decided to focus on a classic: this study was published back in 1997.
I do want to emphasize that subsequent reseach has supported these initial conclusions. As I wrote earlier on the blog, a recent meta-analysis supports these basic findings. Yes, it does seems obvious that we should make our classes relevant and intriguing. Alas, we find that this common-sense strategy interferes with learning. Our students get wrapped up in all those vivid details–imagine lightning drilling a hole in a football helmet!–and lose track of the content we want them to learn.
Our goal should not therefore be to make our lessons boring. Instead, we should make them clear.
I also want to make a second cautious point. Common sense suggests that we should ask our students what helps them learn. Who knows more about students’ learning than students?
Sadly–over and over again–we find that students’ intution just doesn’t lead them in the right direction. Given the choice, students
- prefer review to retrieval practice
- prefer studying a topic all at once to spreading practice out
- prefer highlighting to almost anything else.
I’m told they prefer cookie dough to asparagus.
In order to fulfill our teacherly responsibilities most wisely, we have to look past these preferences to the teaching strategies that truly help students learn. I myself often stop to explain why I am choosing the less-popular approach. (My students have been known to be vexed with me for showing them research studies.) But I do stick to those research-supported strategies even if my students don’t love them.
Despite the common-sense appeal of “making lessons relevant,” despite our students preference for “emotionally interesting” lessons, we should keep our focus on the core goal. To help our students learn, we should prioritize clarity over entertainment, focusing on the core concepts rather than flashy digressions.
So what about Gerard Manley Hopkins? I’m not going to make my poetry unit ‘relevant’ by replacing Hopkins with Olivia Rodrigo lyrics. Instead, I’ll focus on making Hopkins’ difficult language clearer—breaking down the syntax, explaining archaic terms, and helping students see the poem’s structure. This research suggests that clarity, not entertainment, leads to genuine understanding.
Harp, S. F., & Mayer, R. E. (1997). The role of interest in learning from scientific text and illustrations: On the distinction between emotional interest and cognitive interest. Journal of educational psychology, 89(1), 92.
