Influences on Classroom Interest

David A. Bergin

University of Toledo

According to David A. Bergin, a key aspect of fostering the acquisition and nurturance of appreciation for learning is catching the interest of students and holding it. Bergin describes two different types of interest. Person-centered interest, also called individual or personal approach, focuses on what preferences an individual has towards a particular activity. This approach asks, "Given knowledge about a person's background knowledge and current interest, what content areas and activities would be most interesting to that person?" (Bergin 1999). The second type is situational interest examines the content, activities, stimuli, or environmental conditions that are likely to produce interest in an individual. This approach asks, "Can one predict that things will be interesting to most people?" (Bergin 1999).

Bergin says that there are theories of motivation that talks about the atmosphere of the classroom, what teachers should say and how to say it, how to set goals, and the overall goal that teachers should emphasize on, but these theories say very little about how to create interesting tasks for classroom use. People are surrounded by a variety of difficult tasks. Experiencing a match between challenge and perceptions of competence for a task that one perceives as boring is not likely to result in interest (Bergin 1999). Bergin states that most theories of motivation focus on one or two major concepts and they do not entirely integrate other influences on motivation. These two concepts are attributions or goals or the perceptions of competence.

For the rest of the article Bergin discusses the different factors that influence interest, whether it is individual or situational. The chart below shows that factors of each.

Individual Factors	Situational Factors
Belongingness	Hands-on
-cultural value	Discrepancy
-identification	Novelty
-social support	Food
Emotions	Social interaction
Competence	Modeling
Utility--Goal relevance	Games & puzzles
Background knowledge	Content
	Biophilia
	Fantasy
	Humor
	Narrative

Teachers should try to consider individual factors when planning their lessons so that the activities can best fit the existing individual interests. In some places, teachers should try and change these individual interests if there is a lack of background knowledge.