Elsevier

Learning and Instruction

Volume 12, Issue 4, August 2002, Pages 411-428
Learning and Instruction

Gender and interest processes in response to literary texts: situational and individual interest

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0959-4752(01)00008-1Get rights and content

Abstract

This investigation examined interest in literary texts among senior secondary students. It explored how individual and situational factors contribute to topic interest and, using interactive computer techniques, monitored reactions to the texts that followed. Eighty-six tenth graders (equal numbers of boys and girls) participated. Gender was the factor most closely associated with topic interest, and text titles served as important situational triggers. Individual interest in literature made a relatively small contribution to topic interest. Whereas a model linking topic interest, affective responses and persistence operated for higher topic interest texts, for lower interest texts persistence was influenced only by gender.

Introduction

Student interest in literary texts is of particular significance for some of the broader questions concerning achievement among Australian secondary students. Research on adolescent patterns of participation and achievement in education generally, and in literacy more particularly, have indicated that there are significant numbers of boys who are falling behind the levels of achievement of their female peers (Ainley, 1998; Gilbert, 1998). Understanding the role interest plays in initiating and maintaining literacy skills will help address this problem. Does student engagement with particular texts depend upon students coming to the task with a well-developed interest in literature? Does reading further into a text depend on the level of interest aroused when students first encounter the text? Are these responses to the texts different for boys and girls? In order to address these questions we have observed the level of interest triggered by text topics (topic interest), and considered how this is influenced by both the individual interests that students bring to the task and situational factors triggered by features of the text topic. We recorded specific student responses to reading excerpts from a set of four literary texts, including affective responses and decisions about how far they continued reading. This real-time record of student behaviour allowed us to investigate directly issues concerning processes that are consequences of the arousal of interest. We also examined whether gender had a significant influence on these processes.

Section snippets

Interest, motivation and persistence

Interest is one of a number of motivational variables that have been investigated in relation to student engagement and learning outcomes. Variables such as task value (Wigfield & Eccles, 1992), goals (Dweck, 1986; Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Harackiewicz & Elliot, 1993) and self-regulation (Boekaerts, 1997; Pintrich & Garcia, 1991; Schunk & Zimmerman, 1994) all have significant effects on student learning. Research specifically concerned with interest and learning (e.g., Hoffmann, Krapp, Renninger,

Gender and interest in literary texts

There are some long-established findings linking gender with interest in reading specific types of text. Boys prefer adventure, sports, science and information, while girls prefer mystery and romance. Girls are likely to read about male protagonists and their adventures; boys are less likely to read about female protagonists and their activities (Norvell, 1958; Thorndike, 1941). On the other hand, Johnson and Greenbaum (1983) suggested that many of these findings have focused on difference to

Processes following the arousal of interest

The psychological state of interest has been described by Krapp et al. (1992) as a process involving increased attention, positive affect, concentration, and an increased willingness to learn. Hidi (1990) proposed that interest affects learning through determining “how we select and persist in processing certain types of information in preference to others” (p. 549). Monitoring the processes that follow the arousal of interest in specific text topics will provide a test of these propositions.

Participants

The participants in this study were 86 Grade 10 students (39 males and 47 females) from a parochial co-educational high school in an Australian provincial city. The school caters for students from a range of social backgrounds including both working class and middle class families and has students from both rural and urban environments. At the time of data collection the students had a mean age of 15 years 6 months.

Texts

The main experimental task consisted of passages taken from four of the English

Results

Three questions were investigated. The first concerned the contribution of individual and situational factors to topic interest. Individual interest was measured by ratings for a set of general interest domains and tested for relationships with topic interest. The impact of the specific situation on triggered interest was tested in terms of the variability in topic interest generated by the four text titles. The second question focused on the processes that followed arousal of topic interest

Discussion

There were three main aims of the investigation. The first was to determine the relationships between individual and situational factors as they contributed to topic interest for a set of literary texts prescribed for senior secondary students. A second aim was to examine the effects of topic interest on the processing variables recorded as students responded to the texts. The final aim was to determine the contribution of gender to these relationships. These issues will be discussed in turn

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    This paper was originally presented as part of the Symposium “From situation specific to individual interest. Is it possible to develop long-lasting student interest in school activities?”, EARLI Conference, Goteborg, Sweden, August 1999.

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