The Role of Interest in Learning From Scientific Text and Illustrations: On the Distinction Between Emotional Interest and Cognitive Interest

A textbook lesson may be made more interesting by promoting emotional interest through adding entertaining text and illustrations or by promoting cognitive interest through adding signals for structural understanding such as summary illustrations with captions. In Experiment 1, skilled readers who read summary text and illustrations about the process of lightning performed worse on retention of important information and on transfer when entertaining text, illustrations, or both were added. In Experiment 2, skilled readers rated entertaining text and illustrations relatively high in emotional interest and low in cognitive interest and rated summary illustrations and text relatively low in emotional interest and high in cognitive interest. The results suggest benefits of cognitive interest over emotional interest for helping students learn scientific explanations. What can be done to make a scientific textbook lesson more interesting? For example, consider the following scenario. A high school textbook contains a six-paragraph lesson that explains the formation of lightning, such as shown in the Appendix. Students find the passage boring. When asked to explain how lightning is formed, the students perform poorly; when asked to solve problems based on the explanation, they also perform poorly. Instructional designers are called in to improve the interestingness of the lesson, in hopes of improving students' learning.

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