Situational Interest: Its multifaceted Structure in the Secondary School Mathematics Classroom

Mathew Mitchell

According to Mathew Mitchell classroom boredom has been well documented in the research literature for several decades (Mitchell 1993). Most children do not find classrooms the most interesting places to learn. They are not motivated nor interested and mathematics is one of the most common subjects that are driving students to failure.

Throughout this article it is developed that there are two kinds of interest: personal and situational. Personal interest refers to the interest that an individual brings to the context or subject. Situational interest refers to the interest that individuals eventually gain by participating in the area at hand. In the article by Mathew Mitchell, situational interest is the hardest for educators to control. They cannot control what the students are interested in. The educators could plan lessons based on what they feel the students are interested in, however not all students are going to be interested in the same things.

Within interest there is a difference between just catching the students interest and holding the students interest. The ultimate goal is to catch the student’s attention and maintain holding it through out the lesson. If you just catch the student’s interest you are only learning for the moment. When you hold the interest of the students it will lead to deeper levels of thought. It teaches them effective strategies rather than just memorizing the information.

The study was then conducted between three different high schools in the California area. They were measuring the interest that the students had in mathematics. They assessed personal and situational interest and the five components of situational interest: meaningfulness, involvement, computers, groups, and puzzles with the use of an interest survey.

After the study they did conclude that there was a lack of instruments to measure interest. Due to the lack of tools to measure interest they concluded that they would have to do more research into interest. In conclusion the researchers in this study feel that educators need to rethink how to teach mathematics. The educators were simply “telling” the students what they needed to know about mathematics. At this point they are not making an attempt to catch the students interest, let alone hold the interest of the student for the duration of class.

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Summary 2:

Interest defined by Dewey is, "Genuine interest is the accompaniment of the identification, through action, of the self with some object or idea, because of the necessity of that object or idea for the maintenance of a self-initiated activity." Dewey proposes that there are two key factors in the interest construct: identification and absorption. He also goes on to state that "interest is not some one thing: it is a name for the act that a course of action, an occupation, or pursuit absorbs the powers of an individual in a thorough-going way."

To develop a model of interest, three stages, development of of a preliminary model, elaboration on the initial model by using naturalistic, or quantitative, techniques to better understand student perceptions of the interest in their mathematical classrooms, and finally, develop a survey and collect data to will chart the development through the first two stages.

The article goes on to talk about in detail the three stages. The method used in the experiment dealt with seven different scales: personal, situational, how meaningful, the involvement, puzzles, computers and group work. The scales were used to see where the student's feelings were about mathematics. The scale they used was a 6 point number scale. The scale ranged from (6) strongly agree or (1) strongly disagree.

One thing I noticed is that the reliability of the tests were more than satisfactory coefficient. In addition, item pairing is not advisable if the reliability of the scales is not satisfactory. However, the data in this study indicate that all of the individual items within the scale are reasonably satisfactory.