August 1, 2022

In ‘Beware the pitfalls of making lectures “interesting” and focus on curiosity instead’ (Times Higher Education, 27 July 2022), Dr Lee Li Neng, senior lecturer at the NUS Department of Psychology, warns educators against getting caught in a never-ending loop of shinier and shinier edutainment.

Dr Lee argues that educators face three challenges when they focus on making their lessons more interesting. First, educators may conflate an interesting class with an entertaining one, ending up producing edutainment. Second, once educators focus on making their lessons as entertaining as possible, they will have to constantly pursue newer and shinier content to attract students’ attention. Third, an entertaining class often has to cater to students’ decreasing attention spans, but this may result in oversimplifications of complex learning points.

Instead, Dr Lee advocates for cultivating sustained interest and curiosity in students. Educators should foster the culture of asking good questions and use the good questions to shape the curriculum. Moreover, educators can also offer students the autonomy to design their own curriculum. For example, at NUS, the university offers the ‘Design Your Own Module’ Scheme to allow students to pursue self-directed learning together with a supervisor.

Read the article in Times Higher Education here.