Dr. Strange Interest

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the fuzzyness

Taxonomy of Interest (Schraw and Lehman 2001)

Interest

Personal

Latent

Feelingrelated

Valuerelated

Actualized

Situational

Text Based

Seductiveness

Vividness Coherence

Task-based

EncodingTask

Change-of-text

Knowledge-based

Not Exclusive!!! Types of interest can be a combination of these. Where does intrinsic/extrinsic go? What are the benefits & detriments of this rendering?

Personal vs. Situational

• Personal Interest– Pre-existing knowledge, personal experiences, &

emotions

• Situational Interest– Temporary value, environmentally activated, &

context-specific

Personal Interest

• Latent: Long term orientation toward topic– Feeling Related– Value-Related: relates to goal-orientation & self-

regulation– More self regulation when high value, low feeling

• Actualizied: topic-specific motivation that determines engagement style in an activity– High actualized interest may correlate with mastery

goal orientation– Not what you do… how you do it

Situational Interest: Text Based

• Seductiveness: interesting but unimportant text segments (politics, religion, & sex)– Results of seductive details in test as yet unresolved

• Vividness: creates suspense, surprise, otherwise engaging via imagery, concreteness, etc.– Lots of categories, but generally increases interest,

recall, and learning• Coherence: Ease of comprehension– Also positively correlates with interest and learning

The Seductive Detail Debate

Seductive Details Debate

• Wade & Adams 1990: 2x2Importance/Seductiveness– High interest, low import facts had highest recall,

and High interest, high import had second highest.– Concluded no debilitating effect (sorry I couldn’t

find original paper)• Wade, Schraw, Buxton & Hayes 1993:

measured the time students spent High/Low Import/Interest items

Wade, Schraw, Buxton, & Hayes 1993

• What about important details taking a backseat to seductive ones?

• Main ideas require less time to recall

Seductive Details Debate

• Harp & Mayer 1997: found that including seductive details had detrimental effects on recall and problem solving

• Schraw Lehman 2001 criticizes for “non normed” seductive details, may be due to irrelevant or incoherent

What’s the Take Home?

• Shift to increase interest in important elements, not the document itself (Wade et al 1993 )

• Harp & Mayer 1997 Disruption/Diversion Hypothesis– Disruption: Seductive details break up the coherency of main theme– Diversion: Seductive details cause readers to focus on things other

than the main theme• From Wade et al, Duffy et al (1989) on why we shouldn’t

making/following a rubric for designing materials based on this research: – “We cannot tell the writer the critical features that a text must

possess if it is to be classified as comprehensible because no one feature is critical”

Situational Interest Task Based: Active participation of reader

• Encoding-task manipulations: assigning value (categorization) to text elements for things such as relevance

• Greater control/autonomy/agency increases interest

• Inventing games (to play as part of doing boring tasks) increases interest

• Catching/Holding: catching mostly text-based (catching your attention), holding is making sure details are coherent/relevant

Situational Interest Change-of-Text: Nip, Tuck, and Botox that sucker

• Changes to theme of text

• Changes to improve clarity/coherence seem to improve interest/learning

Knowledge Based Interest: Understanding/Knowing positively related to interest

• Tobias (1994)’s 3 personal interest conclusions– Interest relates to deep comprehension of text– Interest and prior-knowledge have a linear relationship– Effects of prior knowledge on interest masked by confounds

unfamiliar materials/task manipulations• U-shaped curve: Sit Interest is highest when people have

moderate knowledge. (Kintch 1980)• Knowledge Schema Theory (KST) assimilation/accommodation

backs up U curve Piagetesque• Current argument because curvilinear supported by KST while

new work Alexander et al. (1995) agrees w/linear … may not be equivalent tests though

Individual Interest:“The intersection of cognitive and affective functioning”

• Individual interest: deepening relation of person to subject content, has qualities of full engagement and task orientation

• Evolves long-term across multiple situations– Gender related individual interest increases with age

• Awareness not required– Motivation w/o goal orientation possible

• Development & Structure of individual interest distinct across people

• Can overcome multiple challenges: dyslexia, Asperger’s and Williams syndromes

Individual Interest

• Relates to flow, intrinsic motivation, task value and the following interests: intrinsic, personal, topic, and situational…

• DIFFERS from the above: individual specific and includes stored knowledge and stored value

• Personal interest defined as topic specific (but I’d wager it’s topic specific to a specific person)

Gender WRT Individual Interest

• There are gender-specific areas of individual interest

• Develop over time… tend towards typicality/neutrality w/ age

• Gender a-typical interests tend to be deeply held if they continue to be held at older age

• Fewer gender differences in performance when limited to a particular context… based more on individual interest

Age and Refinement of Individual Interest

• Undeveloped interest has difficulty with scope– “Science is hard” because defining “science” in the first place

is hard– Teach a man to fish… and he’s comfortable not having any fish

at the moment• Knowledge/Interest also becomes more refined with age

(look at most PhDs)• Well developed Individual Interest can conflict with

academic content• Undeveloped Individual Interest often benefits from

scaffolding w/academic content

Motivation and Individual Interest

• Well developed individual interest: unreflective, non-goal directed, choiceless, effortless, for “it’s own sake”

• Less well developed is aided by goals, interest enhancing strategies (like a primer on the basics)

• Ability to develop individual interest requires– 1 Know enough to organize present info (know the problem space)– 2 Figure out gaps and seek resources– 3 Enjoy developing competence – 4 Distinguish future goals

• W/o strategies are often aided by scaffolding and social learning environments… additional structure.

Relating to Intrinsic Motivation

• Intrinsic Motivation can relate to Situational or Individual Interest

• Individual Interest maps Intrinsic Motiv.:– Problem solving :challenge, competance,

effectance, and mastery motivation– Information Processing: complexity, curiosity,

discrepancy, and incongruity– Control: autonomy, choice, contingencies, and

responsiveness of environment

Teaching to High and Low (developed and undeveloped?) Individual Interest

• Dovetails with intrinsic motivation• Broke the situational immediate component of

individual interest “catch”• From the long term value of material “hold”• Put bright colors and cartoons in math texts to

“catch” situational interest• Added relevance by using word problems of

real life situations to increase “hold” anticipation of future utility

First Experiment: Catch Only• IIM Low/High 1 SD below/above

mean on Individual Interest in Math (Aiken & West 1991)

• Rated interest IN TASK given catch or noncatch

• Catch increased interest in ordinarily un(dis?)interested students while it decreased interest in ordinarily interested students

Possible Explanations?

• Bright colors and cartoons may be distracting to students who have a high level of interest in content

• Catch technique may be patronizing to high interest students (reducing autonomy? agency?)

Second Experiment: Hold Included

• Ran a 2x2 of catch/noncatch and hold/nonhold

• Hold had opposite results of catch

• Doesn’t contradict hypothesis that individual interest has long term value component