0.1 Goals, interests and attributions  (Page 4/7)

Situational interest versus personal interest

Students’ interests vary in how deeply or permanently they are located within students. Situational interests are ones that are triggered temporarily by features of the immediate situation. Unusual sights, sounds, or words can stimulate situational interest. A teachermight show an interesting image on the overhead projector, or play a brief bit of music, or make a surprising comment in passing. At a more abstract level,unusual or surprising topics of discussion can also arouse interest when they are first introduced. Personal interests are relatively permanent preferences of the student, and are usually expressed in a variety of situations. In the classroom, a student may (or may not) have apersonal interest in particular topics, activities, or subject matter. Outside class, though, he or she usually has additional personal interests inparticular non-academic activities (e.g. sports, music) or even in particular people (a celebrity, a friend who lives nearby). The non-academic personalinterests may sometimes conflict with academic interest; it may be more interesting to go to the shopping mall with a friend than to study even yourmost favorite subject.

Benefits of personal interest

In general, personal interest in an academic topic or activity tends to correlate with achievement related to the topic or activity. As you mightsuppose, a student who is truly interested is more likely to focus on the topic or activity more fully, to work at it for longer periods, to use morethoughtful strategies in learning—and to enjoy doing so (Hidi, 2001; Hidi&Renninger, 2006). Small wonder that the student achieves more! Note, though, a persistent ambiguity about this benefit: it is often not clearwhether personal interest leads to higher achievement, or higher achievement leads to stronger interest. Either possibility seems plausible. Research tosort them out, however, has suggested that at least some of the influence goes in the direction from interest to achievement; when elementary students weregiven books from which to learn about a new topic, for example, they tended to learn more from books which they chose themselves than from books that weresimply assigned (Reynolds&Symons, 2001). So interest seemed to lead to learning. But this conclusion does not rule out its converse, that achievementmay stimulate interest as well. As Joe learns more about history, he steadily finds history more interesting; as McKenzie learns more about biology, shegradually wants to learn more of it.

Stimulating situational interests

If a student has little prior personal interest in a topic or activity, the teacher is faced with stimulating initial, situational interest, in hopes thatthe initial interest will gradually become more permanent and personal. There are a number of strategies for meeting this challenge:

• It helps to include surprises in your comments and in classroom activities from time to time: tell students facts that are true but counter-intuitive, forexample, or demonstrate a science experiment that turns out differently than students expect (Guthrie, Wigfield,&Humenick, 2006).
• It also helps to relate new material to students’ prior experiences even if their experiences are not related to academics or to school directly. Theconcepts of gravitation and acceleration, for example, operate every time a ball is hit or thrown in a softball game. If this connection is pointed out toa student who enjoys playing a lot of softball, the concepts can make concepts more interesting.
• It helps to encourage students to respond to new material actively. By having students talk about the material together, for example, students can beginmaking their own connections to prior personal interests, and the social interaction itself helps to link the material to their personal, socialinterests as well.