Increasing Situational Interest in the Classroom

by Gregory Schraw, Terri Flowerday, and Stephen Lehman.

This paper investigates several ways to increase interest inside the classroom. There are two types of interest: situational interest and personal interest. It focuses mostly on situational interest. Situational interest is more of a spontaneous, transitory, and environmentally active type of interest. Personal interest is less spontaneous and endures personal value and is activated internally. Personal interest often comes before situational. Interest increases learning. Situational interest is focused on more because it is thought to be under the control to change by the teacher. For us we will be in the classroom so it is important for us to pay attention to the research done so we might be able to control the student's interest. The thought is that situational interest can increase the want to learn, and situational interest can be increased!

There are three basic strategies to increase situational interest as a teacher. Thos are "(a) offering students meaningful choices, (b) carefully selecting well-organized texts, and (c) helping students to access appropriate background knowledge about the text or task (Schraw, Flowerday, and Lehman, p 2)."

The first of these three strategies is very important. By offering the student choices on what to read, it gives them a sense of responsibility. They can react to this as a sort of motivation to learn. Increasing a student's motivation to learn, increases their ability to learn. They will become more open-minded and will want to expand their knowledge. Research was done by Flowerday and he found that "students with low personal interest had experienced a greater increase in situational interest when given choices of what to read (Schraw, Flowerday, and Lehman, p 5)." By have the students select which materials they want to read, they are able to choose more familiar pieces. When students have prior knowledge of a subject area they feel more comfortable and more interested because they have a sense of what they are learning. Also, having the power of what one is learning increases intrinsic motivation as well as learning!

Text organization is the next strategy of increasing situational interest. They discovered there are three keys to text organization that are detrimental to increasing situational interest. Those are the coherence, relevance, or vividness of the text. Coherence refers to the information within the text. Depending on if it is understandable and flows well together will the student be interested and learn. Relevance affects the person's reason for reading the material. If the text is not relevant to the reader then there are no goals that they are reaching by reading the text. This can have a major influence on situational interest. Vividness has to deal with the power of the written text. If there is nothing within it that "jumps out" at the reader that may act as a suspenseful moment, the reader might be entitled to stop reading because there situational interest has decreased.

Last, but not least, comes the idea of helping the student with background knowledge relating to the actual text. Topic knowledge and domain knowledge are the two types of knowledge that can be possessed during situational interest. Domain knowledge being that related to interest or recall, whereas topic knowledge not having to do with interest or recall. The debate is forming knowledge and interest together. How is it done? The article then continues to give several ways, or suggestions, of ways for increasing student interest in the classroom.

The variables of role of choice, text organization, and prior knowledge play key roles in forming situational interest. There are several ways that situational interest can be approached. It is our job to continue to find ways to increase situational interest to increase the student's learning!