Zahorik, J.A. Elementary and secondary teachers’ reports of how they make learning interesting. The Elementary School Journal. 1996:96(5); 551-564.
Introduction
Holding the attention and involvement of students are concerns of all teachers. Many teachers utilize rewards or other types of extrinsic motivators to entice students to attend; yet another powerful motivator is interest. Interest is typically defined as an interaction between a person and his or her environment. This interaction is intrinsically interesting to the person.
Both the person and the environment are necessary for interest to occur, but they have been studied separately. Person interest, or individual interest, is specific to individuals, develops over time, is mostly stable, and influences a person’s knowledge and reference systems. Environment interest, or situational interest, is sparked by certain stimulus characteristics. This type of interest is shared by most individuals, occurs suddenly, and often has short-term effects. Situational interest can lead to individual interest.
There is agreement among many researchers that a major factor causing situational interest is novelty. Berlyne (1960,1974) found that stimuli that are novel, surprising, and incongruous cause curiosity and conceptual conflict. Deci (1992) identified optimal challenge and novelty as characteristics of interesting tasks. Scheffler (1991) also supported novelty as an important generator of interest. Besides novelty, another factor that appears to cause interest is emotional appeal. Schank (1979), and others have found that issues such as death, sex, violence, and life are universally interesting.
Individual interest is an important component of teaching, yet is rather difficult to use to facilitate learning in a group environment. Situational interest would seem to be an easier task to undertake in a classroom environment. How does this type of interest function in the classroom? It would seem to be, according to the author, that the practical knowledge teachers bring to their classrooms would affect the development of situational interest. The purpose of this study, then, was to investigate teachers’ practical knowledge regarding interest in order to attempt to describe and interpret what teachers do to create interest in learning.
Methods
The subjects of this study consisted of 65 teachers (30 elementary, 35 secondary) who were enrolled in three sections of a graduate course on teaching methods that the author taught. They were a convenience sample chosen to provide the thoughtful data the study required. The teachers taught a wide range of grade levels and subject areas and all were pursuing or had already received a masters’ degree. Experience ranged from 1 to 19 years. Fifty-four of the teachers were women. Approximately 60% of the schools represented were urban, the other 40% suburban.
The author used a reflective writing technique and required the teachers to write four papers concerning interest: (1) Qualities of a Good Learning Experience, (2) A Very Interesting Activity I Have Used, (3) How I Create Interest and What I Do to Avoid Disinterest, and (4) Subject-Matter Facts and Concepts I Have Found to Be Interesting to Students. Analysis of the papers consisted of carefully reading the papers and additions to the papers in search of similar reflections among teachers. To establish validity of the results, the author presented the emergent categories as well as analyses of the papers to teachers who then critiqued them. No objections were raised.
Results and Discussion
The results of the papers regarding teachers’ efforts to promote interest in learning were organized into four areas: actions teachers take, actions teachers avoid, actions regarding content, and the importance of interest actions. The category involving the actions that teachers take found that there were eight different actions teachers use for generating interest in learning. Hands-on activities were cited by every one of the teachers as a preferred action to engage students. Personalized content, student trust, and group tasks were cited by approximately two-thirds of the teachers. Only one third cited a variety of materials and teacher enthusiasm. Less than one-fifth of the teachers cited practical tasks and a variety of activities as actions used to generate student interest (See Table 1). Even though hands-on activities were the most frequently cited form of interest generation, there was little uniformity among the method.
Regarding the actions that teachers avoid, most cited sedentary activities as producing disinterest. Lecturing, explaining, giving directions, reviewing, taking tests, reading textbooks, doing workbooks, and taking notes were all described by the teachers as harmful to interest. Unsuitable tasks, artificial tasks, student distrust, and teacher insipidity were also identified as detracting from interest.
Actions Regarding Content was disappointing. Only one of the eight actions that teachers reported taking to develop interest emphasized content. Furthermore, this action has more to do with adding interest to content than with revealing the inherent interest of the content itself. Also of note is that content topics were cited more than twice as frequently as content ideas. A content topic is a general idea of study, while content ideas are more general areas of study or classes of knowledge. Content ideas are understandings that can be small or big. Twice as many secondary teachers reported using ideas than elementary teachers. Secondary teachers’ use of content as an interest generator was equally divided between topics and ideas, while two-thirds of elementary teachers’ contents consisted of topics.
The final category, Actions Reflecting the Importance of Interest, revealed that nearly every teacher strongly endorsed interest. An examination of the teachers’ description of a good learning experience also showed that teachers believe that interest is of great importance.
Summary and Conclusions
There are three major conclusions from this study. The first is that the generation of situational interest is an important teacher activity. Interest-producing elements were identified more often as being qualities of a good learning experience. The second conclusion is that despite the use of personalized content, student trust, group tasks, variety in materials and activities, teacher enthusiasm, and practical tasks, the main method teachers use to stimulate interest is hands-on activities. The third conclusion is that teachers use content ideas infrequently to establish interest. Teachers rarely use powerful concepts or surprising facts to catch the attention of the students.
Implications and Future Research
The three conclusions suggest that teachers assume that content is intrinsically dull and that many of the concepts in the required curriculum are unappealing to students. Because of this assumption, learning must then be made fun in order for interest to be generated concerning the content. In order to make learning fun and promote interest, teachers utilize hands-on activities most often. However, teachers cannot view these activities as ends in themselves, but as the study indicated many teachers indeed do treat hands-on activities more as an ends than as means. Many researchers such as Flick (1993) and Roth (1992) have observed that hands-on activities often do not result in important learning. The minds-on aspect is often missing.
The finding that many teachers utilize hands-on activities without a substantive purpose brings about the question of why is this occurring? The answer, according to Zahorik, may be related to the content that they are teaching. Zahorik (1970) and Carlsen (1988) found that when teachers were not familiar with the content they were teaching, they often used student-centered activities and techniques. Many variables play a role in promoting interest within the classroom and teachers knowledge alone can not explain the entire issue, but it is a piece of the puzzle that needs more research.
Discussion Questions