Summary

In this article written by Mary Ainley, Suzanne Hidi, and Dagmar Berndorff interest is described to have a strong influence on an individuals cognitive and affective functioning by having an individual predisposition and a psychological state. The article talks about three types of interest that focus on the relationship between interest and learning, those categories are:

1. Individual interest is an "individual's predisposition to attend to certain stimuli, events, and objects".

2. Situational interest is "elicited by certain aspects of the environment".

3. Topic interest is the "level of interest triggered when a specific topic is presented" and it has both individual and situational aspects.

Throughout the article these three categories are discussed individually, but also how each one relates to the other. The rest of the article discusses a case study done on the three interests, their methodological issues and the results.

Individual interest is a predisposition that attends to certain objects and events to engage in certain activities. Students do not have just one individual interest; instead they have a network of individual interests that are closely related to goals of classroom learning. Individual learning involves both seeking new knowledge and expanding old knowledge. In addition to individual interest taking place in specific domains in school subjects or activities in a popular culture, it also has specific domains that lead to a more general individual interest in learning. General individual interest in learning is expressed as "a desire to acquire new information, to find out about new objects, events, and ideas not restricted to any narrow domain". Once a student has a well developed individual interest in a specific domain, topics from that domain may draw on that interest.

Situational interest is a psychological state generated by specific environmental stimuli, which is characterized by focused attention similar to the outcome of individual interest. Situational interest is characterized by two types of factors, formal characteristics, and content features. The formal characteristics consist of novelty, intensity, and ambiguity, which are all called "collative variability". The content features consist of human activity, intensity factors, and life themes. Situational interest is especially effective when dealing with students who do not have preexisting individual interests in their school activities.

Topic interest is the interest elicited by a word or paragraph that presents the reader with a topic. Topic interest involves both situational and individual interest in the way that an existing individual interest in the content of a text will increase the contribution of individual interests. A weak individual interest will suggest that situational factors are paramount. Most topics will have both individual and situational contributing to the topic interest. Topic interest is influenced by both the characteristics of a person, and the features of the environment, both are factors of individual and situational interest.

Summary 2

The article titled “Interest, Learning, and the Psychological Process that Mediate Their Relationship” is Mary Ainley, Suzanne Hidi, and Dagmar Berndorff’s attempt to show the ways in which interest affects learning. They state that “interest has been conceptualized both as an individual predisposition and as a psychological state” (545). They break down the psychological state into the student’s focused attention, their increased cognitive and affective functioning, and persistent effort, which resulted in learning. The article classifies interest as having three different layers:

1.) Individual Interest: an individual’s predisposition to attend to certain stimuli, events and objects

2.) Situational Interest: elicited by certain aspects of the environment

· Content features: human activity or life themes

· Structural features: how the information is presented

3.) Topic Interest: The level of interest triggered when a certain topic is presented

After each type of interest has been fully describe and examined, Ainley, Hidi, and Berndorff present us with an experiment they conducted on a class full of eighth and ninth grade students.

The Experiment

To start the experiment the students were given four topics: Personal health, Animals and Pets, TV and Movies, and Science and were asked to rate each of them on a 1-5 scale. The two questions they were to ask themselves were; “How much I know about it” and “How important it is to me.” With these questions in mind they gave each topic a score from 1-5, one being “a little” and five being “a lot.” The point of this was to identify each student’s individual interest about certain topics.

Once these preliminary measures were out of the way students were then asked to look at a list of four titles of texts they were going to read. Using the 1-5 scale again students then gave each title a score based on how interesting they thought the article would be. The titles were: “Body Image, Chameleons, Star Trek/X-Files, and X-Rays.” This established each student’s topic interest and how much they already knew about the existing titles. Students were then able to choose what order they read each article in and how much of each article they wanted to choose. This test was all done electronically so it could be recorded how much time each student spent on the article and in what order they went. When the students were done reading they were given a multiple choice test based only on what they read to see how much information was retained. Ainley, Hidi, and Berndorff found that all three types of interest seemed to feed off of each other. If individual interest was there, the student was more inclined to keep reading and as a result more learning occurred. If there was no individual interest to start the most learning occurred when a title caught the attention of the students. If the title sounded intriguing the student continued reading, setting up his situational interest. The article states that “the strongest model linking topic interest and learning suggested that topic interest was related to affective response, affect was then related to persistence with the text, and persistence was related to learning” (558). Deeper learning happened when there was triggered interest and maintained interest.