Perhaps my base case is an interesting article
For my learning and motivation class the paper assigned for tomorrow is “The Four-Phase Model of Interest Development”. For anyone concerned with the declining enrollments in CS or who wants to engage underrepresented groups in CS I would recommend reading it. The paper is less of a description of original research, and more of a proposal of a framework for developing interest.
So here are some of the highlights and my comments from the paper:
First of all interest is defined as “a motivational variable [that] refers to the psychological state of engaging or the predisposition to reengage with particular classes of objects, events, or ideas over time.” The thing that struck me was the idea that by definition interest = action. Later the author states that “it is a biological function of the psychological state of interest in the sense that the person is engaged physically, cognitively, or symbolically with the object of his or her interest”. So the question becomes not how do I get my students to find this interesting, but instead how do I inspire action in them. Its a different question and one that leads to different strategies I think.
One example that they gave in the paper was of a girl named Julia who picked up a magazine in a doctor’s office and based on a description in a magazine. The authors talk about interest being biologically grounded in a seeking behavior. This leads me to ask do our students need to be somehow primed into this seeking behavior? either by activating an already existing need or by offering them a scenario that prompts them to internalize a new need.
Finally, a key aspect to having students develop the most long term and pervasive type of interest is the fostering of a questioning mentality in the student. Its discussed in several parts of the paper - here are some examples:
An essential component of the four phase model is that support and opportunities to pursue interest-related questions are necessary for each phase of interest. Without these, regression to a previous phase of interest can be expected to occur.
In later phases of interest development, as a person begins to generate curiosity questions, he or she seeks repeated engagement and has not only positive feelings but also increased stored knowledge and stored value for particular content.
a person’s developing understanding of particular activities or ideas and the generation of curiosity questions. The process of pursuing answers to curiosity questions, for example, is accompanied by positive feelings that surface in anticipation of and work with particular content as well as feelings generated in present engagement.
However, as individual interest begins to emerge in the late phases, it is important that students also be encouraged to generate their own questions. Students need models of people seriously engaging with the questions of a discipline. For students’ interests to continue to develop, however, they also need to generate their own curiosity questions to connect their present understandings to alternate perspectives.
When was the last time a lesson, an activity or an assignment prompted the question “I wonder how they do that” either in you or your students?
Rethinking this in broader terms, looking at a lot of efforts to engage students in computer science many of the topics have been about showing students how something works. How a robot works, how a program works, etc. Can we make an intervention that instead prompts students to be curious? to ask how? and to see themselves as the kind of person who could look for those answers? Maybe thats why CSI became such a popular show and eventually prompted a societal response - not because the show was “cool” but because it constantly offered situations where professionals modeled interacting with the domain, asking difficult questions and engaging in problem solving. It prompted curiosity that fueled long term individual interest.
What do you think?
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009