More than Enjoyment: Identifying the Positive Affect Component of Interest That Supports Student Engagement and Achievement.

In this article we focus on the widely researched motivational construct, interest, with the aim of identifying the character of affect associated with students' interests. There is a well-documented association between interest and students' engagement with classroom activities. It is also widely accepted that enjoyment plays a role in the dynamic processes operating when students engage with interesting learning activities. We used an innovative measure (MINE) that invites participants to explore and nominate their interests from a relatively large pool of interests. Young adolescent students (N=213, mean age 13 years 6 months) explored this interactive space to select interests and then had the opportunity to expand on the selected interests through text comments as well as ratings on affective and experiential scales. On average students chose approximately 5 interests and we describe the distribution of interest content for these choices. As expected there were differences between boys and girls in their patterns of interests. Using the students' ratings of their interests on 7 affect terms we found that across all of the nominated interests there was a consistent pattern; high ratings of happy, excited, and proud, moderate to high ratings for hopeful, and very low ratings for the negative affect terms, frustrated, anxious, and sad. This pattem was consistent across interest content and gender groups. Individual profiles of the affective responses associated with 2 students' chosen interests are described and some of the insights these profiles offer to teachers are explored. Knowledge of how specific feelings are active when students engage with the content of their interests assist practitioners to understand how interests might be used to personalize learning activities and curriculum choices in the service of greater student engagement with learning.As this reference to Plato shows, the part emotion plays in learning and achievement has been recognized since the dawn of organized schooling. In the first decade of this century the positive psychology movement (e.g., Seligman, Emst, Gillham, Reivich, & Linkins, 2009) has brought the importance of happiness in schooling to the attention of talk* back radio and daytime television audiences. Simultaneously, a significant number of education researchers have elevated emotion to a central place in their investigations into factors that support school achievement.So why has there been this resurgence of interest regarding the place of feelings in the learning process? For at least two decades educational commentators have highlighted patterns of decreasing motivation (e.g., Eccles & Wigfield, 2002) and increasing levels of disengagement over time among students from developed countries (e.g., Skinner, Furrer, Marchand, & Kindermann, 2008; Willms, 2003). Pintrich and De Groot, summed up the essence of this problem in their admonition: Students need to have both the will and the skill to be successful in classrooms (1990, p. 38).While the place of skills and abilities are central to educational achievement, turning skills and abilities into actual achievement requires students to exercise will. For Pintrich will included factors such as selfefficacy, intrinsic value (a combination of interest and value), and self-regulation. Recent educational research presents a variety of motivational constructs: expectancy-value theory (e.g., Eccles, 2005), achievement goals (e.g., Elliot, 1999; Harackiewicz, Barron, Pintrich, Elliot, & Thrash, 2002), interest (e.g., Hidi & Renninger, 2006; Krapp, 2003), selfefficacy (e.g., Pajares & Schunk, 2001), selfregulation (e.g., Schunk & Zimmerman, 2008) and a number of other constructs (see Murphy & Alexander, 2000). Most recently one sector of this literature has turned its lens toward emotions as part of the complex of factors contributing to achievement. …