Dr. Strange Interest

1. Dr. Strange Interest Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the fuzzyness

2. Taxonomy of Interest (Schraw and Lehman 2001) Not Exclusive!!! Types of interest can be a combination of these. Where does intrinsic/extrinsic go? What are the benefits & detriments of this rendering?

3. Personal vs. Situational • Personal Interest • Pre-existing knowledge, personal experiences, & emotions • Situational Interest • Temporary value, environmentally activated, & context-specific

4. 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

5. 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

6. The Seductive Detail Debate

7. 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

8. Wade, Schraw, Buxton, & Hayes 1993 • What about important details taking a backseat to seductive ones? • Main ideas require less time to recall

9. 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

10. 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”

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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)

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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.

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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?)

23. 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