Interest, inferences, and learning from texts

Disentangling the effects of interest and choice on learning, engagement, and attitude

“…Similar to previous studies (Alexander & Jetton, 1996;Cordova & Lepper, 1996;Flowerday et al, 2004;Hidi, 1990), situational interest was the most important influence on learning, engagement, and attitudes. Expanding on prior research that demonstrated the importance of topic interest (Ainley et al, 2002a,b;Clinton & van den Broek, 2012;Renninger et al, 2002), our results suggest that topic interest primarily works through its impact on increasing situational interest.…”

What Preschoolers Bring to the Show: The Relation Between Viewer Characteristics and Children’s Learning from Educational Television

“…This is likely due to the fact that there is no clear, agreed-upon conceptualization of interest. While we operationalized interest as the child's willingness to engage in a particular activity, other scholars have defined interest in terms of attention (Ainley et al, 2002), motivation (Tobias, 1994), and engagement (Clinton & van den Broek, 2012), all operationalized in different ways. The interest assessment that we used was created especially for this study and, thus, its validity had not been established.…”

“…He argued that the motivation to learn brought out by interest in a subject area could lead to increased learning by invoking deeper types of comprehension processes, greater use of imagery, and a more extensive network of relevant associations. Indeed, in an empirical study, Clinton and van den Broek (2012) found that topic interest was positively associated with inference generation, which, in turn, was associated with greater recall and comprehension among students.…”

How are learning strategies reflected in the eyes? Combining results from self‐reports and eye‐tracking

“…Learning from expository texts is one of the most fundamental skills in our current society, and the competence to learn from demanding textbooks is crucial in education and beyond (Clinton & van den Broek, ; Mason, Tornatora, & Pluchino, ; O'Brien, Cook, & Lorch, ). The Student Approaches to Learning (SAL) tradition is mainly interested in how students learn during their academic studies (Gijbels, Donche, Richardson, & Vermunt, ; Vermunt & Donche, ).…”