Balancing Person-Centered and Variable-Centered Approaches: Latent Growth Modeling to Explore Triggering and Maintaining Situational Interest

• In Event: Person-Centered Methodologies and Motivation Research: What Does It Add and Where Is It Going?

Abstract

Objectives: To use LGM to examine the dynamics of the novelty effect couched within theoretical models of interest development. We focus on how we systematically built our LGMs. We first establish if pre-intervention motivation had an effect on the intercept (triggered SI) and the slope (maintained SI) of our situational interest data. We then demonstrate the building of our subsequent models highlighting the effect of intercept and slope on post-intervention measures of motivation. We will show how these steps provide insights from a person-centered perspective about the types or "profiles" of triggered and maintained SI. The subsequent models allow us to take a variable-centered perspective to explore both predictors of these different profiles and the outcomes of these models.
Theoretical Framework: Hidi and Renninger’s (2006) four-phase model of interest development outlines how students develop their nascent interest in an activity into more enduring interests in a larger field of study. Within this model, the novelty effect is a phenomenon in which SI for a novel learning environment is triggered but not maintained. Because our virtual environment (EcoMUVE) was designed to support and develop students’ knowledge and skills related to scientific inquiry, fading of triggered SI for EcoMUVE likely means that individual interest for the subject of science also suffers. However, if triggered SI is maintained, students’ interest for science is more likely to benefit.
Methods: A total of 202 Grade 6 participants from two different teachers in a school set within a relatively affluent suburban area in the Northeastern United States were involved in the study.
Analysis: We used theory to help us build models of the complex relationships between task-specific SI and subject-level motivation. We iterated between a variable-centered approach (i.e., model building to determine best fitting model, as well as exploring relationships between our profiles and outcomes like self-efficacy), and a person-centered approach (i.e., exploring the combination of triggered and maintained SI as a mediator between pre-intervention and post-intervention motivation). To do this, we fit a series of five latent growth models (Singer & Willett, 2003). We tested model fit at each stage by assessing a range of fit statistics (Kline, 2011).
Results and Conclusions: This variable-centered approach allowed us to fit a structural model to meaningfully represent our data. Once we did this, we found that there were different “profiles” to experiencing the novelty effect. In one such profile, students’ interests in the technology are triggered but not adequately maintained. Another way of experiencing the novelty effect was to have an interest in the technology triggered and adequately maintained. From a person-centered perspective, most students seemed to have their interests in the technology activated, though it dropped for most. Finally, using variable-centered analyses, we found that, for students whose SI was maintained, individual interest in science was higher than their peers, controlling for teacher effects and pre-intervention motivation. We now better understand how different SI profiles mediate the effects of pre-intervention motivation on post-intervention motivation while participating in a technologically novel learning environment.

Authors

• Jason A. Chen, The College of William and Mary

• Michael Shane Tutwiler, Harvard University