Interest, Learning, and Motivation by Ulrich Schiefele

This article dove in to the history and research of the idea of Interest or intrinsic motivation. It first suggests that the word interest is an ambiguous notion that seems to be historically overlooked in the world psychology. The first psychologists that began investigating interest was Herbart. Herbart was the first to suggest that interest is the key attribute to successful learning. It is believed that interest can be broken into two separate characteristics, Individual and Situational. Individual is believed to be the most desirable because it is the most intrinsic.

The article also explains in depth, the studies that have been done on the topic of Interest. Over these experiments it was determined that people with high-interest will work more intensely on understanding a subject than those that are less interested. On the other hand, people that are less interested seem to comprehend information verbatim as oppose to people with a high level of interest that seem to personalize the information they absorbed. Another study came to the conclusion that interest is triggered at a higher rate when combined with elaboration and information seeking strategies. TO the negative side, this study also suggested that students with high level interest are at an advantage because they are able to utilize deeper learning resources than those which are less interested. The conclusion to these studies states that learning strategies are an absolute factor in stimulating interest.

This article offers many answers on the topic of interest but it also asks many questions that Interest Theorist have Forgotten. For instance, what is the relation between motivation and learning successfully? How does interest help a person learn learning strategies?

Schiefele’s article is very detailed. He has researched the concepts of interest. He argues that that the constructs that are in affect are falling in the motivational area. Schiefele article gives an overview of the history of interest by introducing Dewey’s perspective on interest. He proves very detailed definitions of interest by discussing individual and situational interest with examples. Schiefele also goes into further detail by dividing individual interest into sub-categories of latent characteristics and actualized individual interest. He also, gives an overview of the consequences of interest. He talks about the qualities of learning and strategies of learning of interest.

Schiefele has a cluster of other resources to support his information in his article. This article was very useful for my group and I to put together our website. The information in the article was very detailed and was supported by examples, which made it easier for us in the group to understand interest a little bit better.

This article is very informative and has a lot of information about interest. Schiefele starts by describing the history of interest and that interest is a vague term but he breaks down the term into many different categories. It is a term that has a lot of history and research that has been done on it. It all started with Deci and Ryan and Dewey as intrinsic motivation theorists and then more and more people researched it. It is argued in the article that the constructs in effect are failing in the motivational area. The article gives an in depth explanation of the definition of interest as well as the consequences it has on learning. It is then broken down into latent characteristics and actualized individual interesting with situational and individual interest categories. It is also described how to use learning strategies to encourage more interest and help students elaborate and enhance their learning. He then follows up to explain what other research could be done and how to continue to find more research on the topic of interest.

For each of Schiefele’s points he has many articles, research, and examples to explain the points of view and support his ideas. The article was very detailed and helped me find the factors that interest plays on learning including the consequences, and quality of learning because of interest. It was a very interesting article to read and I found it to be helpful.