Universality and Uniqueness of Students’ Situational Interest in Physical Education: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Situational interest (SI) has been conceptualized in physical education (PE) as a multidimensional construct including five dimensions: instant enjoyment, exploration intention, attention demand, novelty and challenge. Consistent with Ding, Sun and Chen ( 2013 ), who argued for the need ‘to develop cross-culture models to examine the universality of the motivation constructs’, the purpose of this study was to investigate the universality and uniqueness of students’ SI by comparing three French-speaking PE contexts. Participants were 1812 secondary school students from Belgium, France, and Switzerland. They responded to the French 15-item SI scale and the Total Interest scale ( Roure, Pasco & Kermarrec, 2016 ) after practicing learning tasks in regular PE lessons. The relationships between the SI dimensions and total interest were compared between the three samples using correlation and regression analyses. A multivariate analysis of variance was also used to compare SI scores between the contexts. The results revealed that instant enjoyment and exploration intention were the two major motivating dimensions, highlighting the universality of students’ SI, whereas challenge and novelty revealed the uniqueness of this construct explored.

Students’ individual interest in physical education: Development and validation of a questionnaire

“…In physical education (PE), systematic research on interest has mainly investigated situational interest and its effects on students’ knowledge (e.g., Zhu, Chen, Ennis, Sun, Hopple & Bonello, 2009), students’ energy expenditure (e.g., Ding, Sun & Chen, 2013), students’ learning strategies (e.g., Roure, Kermarrec & Pasco, 2019), and its relationships with video feedback (Roure, Méard, Lentillon‐Kaestner, Flamme, Devillers & Dupont, 2019), learning task design (e.g., Roure & Pasco, 2018) and PE contexts (e.g., Lentillon‐Kaestner & Roure, 2019; Roure, Lentillon‐Kaestner, Méard & Pasco, 2019). This centration on situational interest (for a review please read Chen & Wang, 2017) can be explained by the fact that educational researchers consider that situational interest possesses stronger motivational potential than individual interest in daily teaching‐learning settings, because teachers can enhance situational interest in learning tasks by manipulating their components (Roure & Pasco, 2018).…”

Relationships between students’ individual interest, achievement goals, perceived competence and situational interest: A cluster analysis in swimming

“…Roure and Pasco, 2018), the use of video feedback augmented by teachers' feedback (Roure et al, 2019c) and the specific characteristics of PE contexts such as single-sex or co-educational classes (e.g. Lentillon-Kaestner and Roure, 2019;Roure et al, 2019b). More generally, the positive effects of triggering and maintaining SI have been demonstrated on students' knowledge (e.g.…”

“…Various factors have been identified that trigger and maintain students’ SI such as learning task design (e.g. Roure and Pasco, 2018), the use of video feedback augmented by teachers’ feedback (Roure et al, 2019c) and the specific characteristics of PE contexts such as single-sex or co-educational classes (e.g. Lentillon-Kaestner and Roure, 2019; Roure et al, 2019b).…”

Epistemic Curiosity and Situational Interest: Distant Cousins or Identical Twins?

“…In addition, it is assumed that the initial triggering of situational interest, and its maintenance, are early stages in the development of a more stable and sustainable individual interest in a particular knowledge domain (Hidi and Renninger 2006). Most situational interest researchers concur with Hidi and Renninger (2006) that situational interest is a transient process characterized by increased arousal, positive affect, and focused attention in response to incongruent information (e.g., Alexander et al 1995;Chen et al 2001;Dorfner et al 2018;Habig et al 2018;Lin et al 2013;Linnenbrink-Garcia et al 2010;Magner et al 2014;Park 2015;Rotgans and Schmidt 2011;Roure et al 2019b;Schraw 1997;Tapola et al 2014;Tin 2009a).…”