Interest and intrinsic motivation are two important factors that can bring positive learning outcomes. Students who have higher interest and intrinsic motivation actively engage in learning, pay more attention, and become involved in positive emotiona ...
Interest and intrinsic motivation are two important factors that can bring positive learning outcomes. Students who have higher interest and intrinsic motivation actively engage in learning, pay more attention, and become involved in positive emotional and cognitive states that lead to enhanced performance (Hidi & Renninger, 2006). Therefore, it is important to investigate the role of interest and intrinsic motivation in students’ learning processes. However, there are still several problems exist in the current research of interest. For example, the definition of interest is still in ambiguous. It is easily confused with interest with other conceptions such as curiosity and intrinsic motivation. Also, because of the ambiguous definition of interest, no such interest scale exists that demonstrates satisfying reliability and validity. Moreover, understanding about the important mediating factors between interest and learning environment such as personality, is still insufficient. All of these limitations can be attributed to the fact that due to lack of a comprehensive model that integrates development and maintenance of interest, and a practical learning-based model on interest has been failed to be proposed.
Therefore, we aimed to measure individual learner’s development of interest, and our goal was to develop a scale and to make a comprehensive model that incorporates development of interest in order to mediate individual’s interest development by understanding more fully about social culture, learning contexts, and individual differences.
During the first year, by investigating societal culture (exposure to private tutoring), learning contexts and individual differences (self-efficacy, perceived competence, perfectionism, conformity, and self-constual), we made categorizations and more clearly specified interest and intrinsic motivation. Moreover, by studying the relationships between interest, intrinsic motivation, variety of socio-cultural factors, learning contexts, and individual differences, our research contributed to findings about the development and maintenance of interest and intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, in the second year, we developed a new interest scale and proposed a model for intrinsic motivation based on interest by adding onto the preliminary studies done during the previous year by studying elements that trigger interest through research in more specific learning materials (novelty, self-relevance) and activities (content skimming). Likewise, we established a more clear and reliable foundation of research in interest and intrinsic motivation via an interest-centered intrinsic motivation model based on empirical findings through the second year. We expect that our new scale that takes into consideration domestic socio-cultural characteristics will be useful in the current educational environment where no valid interest scale exists. As a result, we will be able to provide with guidelines about creating an effective learning environment based on interest.