Students apparently find what they called "gossip" (stories about their instructor's experiences with family and friends) not only entertaining, at least according to their comments on student evaluations at the end of the quarter, but also worth remembering. Tannen (1990) believes women are especially attuned to such personal information, employing gossip as a means of establishing a personal connection. With a female instructor and a predominately female class, perhaps such information was particularly salient. With so few males in the class, I did not include gender as a variable; however, it may be worth considering in future studies. In any case, apparently gossip can be educational.

A possible alternative explanation revolves around the "memory load" required of students for each lecture condition. Though all class meetings were 90 minutes long, the amount of information covered in a class meeting may not have been equivalent. If, for example, one could measure the number of facts presented per class, lectures that presented concepts alone, without instructor's personal examples, could cover more material than lectures in which the instructor also took class time to give examples from personal experiences.