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Journal of the Learning SciencesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:This article seeks to sharpen current conceptualizations of interests and engaged participation, and to derive lessons for the design of interest-driven science learning environments (formal and informal). The empirical basis of the research is a set of ethnographic records of two communities of amateur astronomers, as well as the details of astronomers' instantiations of the hobby. Hobbies are paradigmatic examples of interest-driven practices and thus they offer an excellent window into truly interest-related phenomena and processes. The analysis and data collection followed a grounded theoretical process, which I describe in two parts. First, I comb through the data iteratively and present a theory of persistent engagement in a hobby practice. Based on this theoretical sketch, I then explain how individuals' persistent, interest-based pursuit of amateur astronomy is made possible by 4 structural and process features of the practice, which together afford individuals the ability to continuously tailor the hobby: (a) an extensive and varied material infrastructure; (b) participating simultaneously across multiple communities/sites of astronomy practice; (c) activity structural resources that function as templates for short-and long-term activities; and (d) processes of collaboration and idea sharing. Lessons for the design of science learning environments that are truly interest-driven follow.

We investigate the dynamics of student engagement as it is manifest in selfdirected, self-motivated, relatively long-term, computer-based scientific image processing activities. The raw data for the study are video records of 19 students, grades 7 to 11, who participated in intensive 6-week, extension summer courses. From this raw data we select episodes in which students appear to be highly engaged with the subject matter. We then attend to the fine-grained texture of students' actions, identifying a core set of phenomena that cut across engagement episodes. Analyzed as a whole, these phenomena suggest that when working in self-directed, self-motivated mode, students pursue proposed activities but sporadically and spontaneously venture into self-initiated activities. Students' recurring self-initiated activities -which we call personal excursions -are detours from proposed activities, but which align to a greater or lesser extent with the goals of such activities. Because of the deeply personal nature of excursions, they often result in students collecting resources that feed back into both subsequent excursions and framed activities. Having developed an understanding of students' patterns of self-directed, selfmotivated engagement, we then identify four factors that seem to bear most strongly on such patterns: (1) students' competence (broadly construed); (2) features of the softwarebased activities, and how such features allowed students to express their competence; (3) the time allotted for students to pursue proposed activities, as well as self-initiated ones; and (4) the flexibility of the computational environment within which the activities were implemented.

I advance theoretically and empirically grounded arguments for broadening how we frame and understand situational interests. A situational interest refers to the short-term spike in a person's attention and participation in an activity and it is triggered in the interactions between the person and environment features (e.g., novelty and surprise). As represented in the literature, extant conceptions of the phenomenon frame it fundamentally as a discontinuity in a person's experiences. Put differently, a situational interest denotes a moment in which a new object or activity is first brought into a person's stream of experiences and its triggering marks the boundary between two qualitatively distinct moments-a before-and-after-in one's ongoing activity participation. In contrast, I conjecture that situational interests are best understood as phenomena that combine both discontinuous and continuous dimensions of experience. To argue this point, I use three in-depth videotaped case studies of the triggering and (when available) retriggering of situational interests in STEM-based practices and show that the continuity + discontinuity lens provides a fine-grained and more accountable description of the phenomenon, its triggering process, and its eventual uptake and development (or not). K E Y W O R D Sactivity, continuities and discontinuities, individual interest, situational interest, socio-cultural theory