Evidence-Based Instructional Design: The Seductive Power of Pretty Pictures

Today, let's have some real talk about one of the world's most pressing problems. A scourge that affects nearly every man, woman, and child on earth. I am speaking, of course, of the ongoing failure of fast food ice cream machines.

We are assured that the problem is that "the machine is down." But let's suppose, for the sake of this article, that the real problem is a lack of knowledge and skill among fast food employees in the operation and maintenance of these beasts. Let's further suppose that we have been hired by MegaBurger, Inc. to develop an elearning program to tackle this problem once and for all. If we succeed, we will restore delicious soft serve to the people and bring about lasting peace in the world!

Two Kinds of Images

On one of the screens in our course, we have a labeled image of the ice cream machine itself alongside some instructional text on routine maintenance. This image is instructionally-relevant. It has a clear instructional purpose.

On another screen, additional instructional text on machine maintenance is accompanied by an image of an adorable child enjoying ice cream:

This image is decorative. (Ruth Colvin Clark, the Godmother of evidence-based training, would call this a "pumpkin graphic.") It's included to add visual interest or to increase emotional engagement with the material, but it has no instructional purpose.

The value of instructionally-relevant images isn't controversial. Everyone can see the value of images that illustrate the ideas expressed in the instructional text. But what about those decorative images? Do "pumpkin graphics" aid learning or hinder it?

The argument in favor of decorative images is this: By engaging learners' emotions, we hope to capture their attention and hold their interest. Sure, that picture of a kid eating ice cream doesn't directly address the learning topic, but it sure does catch the learner's eye. That's got to be helpful, right? Right?

Research on Decorative Images in eLearning

"...undergraduate students read and answered questions about two texts, with and without decorative, irrelevant images, in an e-learning course. The presence of decorative images had a small detrimental effect on comprehension." (The Decorative Images’ Seductive Effect in e-Learning Depends on Attentional Inhibition, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology)

Students who read a lesson containing irrelevant illustrations about lightning formation performed significantly worse on recall and transfer tests than students who read the text without the illustrations. (How Seductive Details Do Their Damage: A Theory of Cognitive Interest in Science Learning, Journal of Educational Psychology)

"This meta-analysis reveals a significant seductive detail effect with small to medium [negative] (retention performance) and medium [negative] (transfer performance) effects." (A Review of Research and a Meta-Analysis of the Seductive Detail Effect, Educational Research Review)

Conclusions

Researchers are still trying to figure out exactly how and why decorative images detract from learning. As discussed above, we are sometimes tempted to include decorative graphics because we hope they will grab the learner's attention. According to some researchers, this is exactly why these graphics are detrimental to learning. In fact, researchers typically refer to emotionally-engaging, but instructionally-irrelevant, graphics as seductive. The idea is that they misdirect the learner's attention away from the relevant content.

Regardless of how decorative graphics lead us astray, however, we can reasonably conclude the following:

• Decorative graphics impair recall to a modest degree.
• Decorative graphics impair training transfer (i.e., the application of what is learned) to a moderate degree.

Practical Implications

The implication here is dead simple: avoid decorative graphics. The more effective they are at capturing the learner's attention, the more destructive they are to the learning process.

Note: The research on this topic has focused mainly on images appearing alongside instructional text. We don't have enough evidence to know if instructionally-irrelevant images standing alone on title screens or transition screens has the same affect.