A Study of the Influence of Seductive Details in Popular Science Micro Videos on the Learning Effect

Abstract

Popular science micro video is a form of popular science with the aim of knowledge popularization. It usually lasts for 30 seconds to 20 minutes and mainly was spread on mobile terminals. Often it contains a lot of interesting, attractive but non-important content, and the content may not directly relate to the main knowledge points of popular science. Such content can be called seductive details. Studies have shown that adding seductive details to teaching materials will have negative impacts on learning. However, popular science micro video is a form of multimedia with low cognitive difficulties and constant changes in media and learning environment. In addition, the effect of seductive details may change. The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of seductive details in popular science micro videos on learning effects. In this experiment, 44 students were selected to watch popular science micro videos that have seductive details. Then the relationships between the memory amount of seductive details, accumulation of prior knowledge and the learning effect of science knowledge (memorizing and transferring) were analyzed. According to the results, in the case of low cognitive load, the addition of seductive details in popular science micro videos had no effect on the memorizing effect of popular science knowledge, but improved the transferring effect. The learning effect of popular science knowledge had nothing to do with audience's prior knowledge level. Therefore, this study suggested that some seductive details should be added to popular science micro videos but the difficulty of making popular science micro videos should be reasonably controlled, which would make the videos more interesting and help enhance the learning effect of popular science knowledge.