Effects of Example Choice on Interest, Control, and Learning

Supporting interest of middle school students in mathematics through context personalization and example choice

“…Context personalization positively influence performance, especially among weaker students, in some studies (Anand & Ross, 1987;Ku et al, 2007;Ku & Sullivan, 2002;Walkington, Petrosino, & Sherman, 2013; whereas other studies did not observe such beneficial effects (Bates & Wiest, 2004;Cakir & Simsek, 2010;Ku & Sullivan, 2000). Furthermore, example choice as well as the opportunity of choice in instructions was not associated with increased performance (Flowerday, Schraw, & Stevens, 2004;Reber et al, 2009). …”

“…Based on the theoretical backdrop, we predict that context personalization and example choice can trigger and maintain students' situational interest and value perception during the learning activity, compared to a generic learning material (Reber et al, 2009;. However, individual interest and perceived competence moderated the effects of interventions in opposite directions, making clear predictions difficult.…”

“…The opportunity of choice in the learning environment has repeatedly been associated with situational interest and intrinsic motivation (Cordova & Lepper, 1996;Patall, 2012Patall, , 2013Patall, Cooper, & Robinson, 2008;Patall, Cooper, & Wynn, 2010;Patall, Sylvester, & Han, 2014;Reber et al, 2009), and is often related to the need for autonomy within the theoretical framework of self-determination theory (e.g. Deci & Ryan, 2000).…”

“…Example choice is an instructional approach that offers students a choice between predefined topics for an academic text, prior to learning something new. Students can then select the topic they find most interesting and work a subject matter in a self-chosen context that they may find exciting (Reber, Hetland, Chen, Norman, & Kobbeltvedt, 2009). Context personalization and example choice bridge school mathematics with students' out-of-school interests, which is supposed to stimulate interest in content .…”

Designing learning personalized to students’ interests: balancing rich experiences with mathematical goals

“…All of the studies reviewed previously have little ownership. In some of the studies, students were given a limited amount of ownership by selecting which task version they wished to receive (Cordova and Lepper 1996;Høgheim and Reber 2015;Reber et al 2009;Walkington et al 2016), and this was generally beneficial to interest or learning. Higher ownership interventions where students must generate how the content they are learning is useful to their interests and lives by writing short essays have found positive results for learning (Hulleman and Harackiewicz 2009;Hulleman et al 2010).…”