Surprise-Induced Awareness of a Knowledge Deficit Promotes Situational Interest and Learning

• In Event: 61.032 - When Rubber Meets the Road: How Interest Shapes Learners' Interactions With Content

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Framework
The objective of this paper is to report findings of two studies that examined whether making students consciously aware that stimulus materials contain surprising information results in higher levels of situational interest and learning.

The two studies reported here are about situational interest, a transient phenomenon that can be triggered by contextual and environmental stimuli, such as puzzles or problems (Hidi & Renninger, 2006).

Recently, Rotgans and Schmidt (2014) proposed a hypothesis that predicts how situational interest is aroused by instructional materials: the “knowledge-deprivation hypothesis of situational interest.” They demonstrated in a series of experiments that situational interest is a motivational response to a consciously perceived knowledge deficit, resulting in search for new information (see also Berlyne, 1978). For instance, in one experiment they demonstrated that only if participants lacked knowledge about a particular problem stimulus, situational interest was aroused. Interest was not aroused for participants who had sufficient knowledge regarding the stimulus. Moreover, their findings suggest that for situational interest to be triggered, individuals need to be made consciously aware that they have a knowledge gap.

In these studies, they did not further elaborate on how individuals can be made consciously aware that they have a knowledge deficit. With the present studies, we investigated if emphasizing to students that a problem stimulus contains surprising information would make them more aware of their knowledge deficit and result in the arousal of situational interest.

Method and Sources of Data
Study 1 was a laboratory experiment in which 41 secondary school students participated. Both treatment and control groups were presented a problem about the causes of coastal erosion and their level of situational interest was measured. One of the groups was cued that the information provided in the problem was surprising. Data were analyzed by means of ANCOVA.

Study 2 was a quasi-experiment in which 57 students participated. This study was a replication and extension of Study 1 in that academic achievement was measured. Data were analyzed by means of ANCOVA.

Results and Scholarly Significance
The results of Study 1 suggest that the treatment had a significant effect on situational interest (F(1, 38) = 5.45, p = .03, η2 = .13). Those who were aware that the information contained in the problem was surprising experienced higher levels of situational interest.

The results of Study 2 confirmed the findings from Study 1 and demonstrate that the cuing treatment not only had a positive effect on situational interest (F(1, 53) = 4.62, p = .04, η2 = .08) but also on learning outcomes (F(1, 53) = 4.51, p = .04, η2 = .08).

Our findings provide additional support for the knowledge-deprivation hypothesis of situational interest and substantiated the idea that students need to be made consciously aware of their lack of knowledge for situational interest to emerge.

Authors

• Jerome I. Rotgans, National Institute of Education - Nanyang Technological University

• Henk G. Schmidt, Radboud University Nijmegen