Yi-Miau Tsai Ph.D.Our visiting scholar is Dr. Yi-Miau Tsai, a post-doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Dr. Tsai is a native of Taiwan where she received her MS., in Psychology at the national University prior to moving to Germany to begin her doctoral work in Educational Research at the International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course.
Dr. Tsai’s research interest include learning and instruction, achievement motivation and goals, and the context and cultural effects on motivation. She is currently working on a project called COACTIV: Cognitive Activation in the Classroom: The Orchestration of Learning which hopes to measure the intra-individual variability of student motivation in lessons.
Please read the above article and begin to post your questions between November 12 and November 22. Note:You've already read this article once for the Interest class section. Please re-read.
Dr. Tsai will respond to your questions over the period November 19 to November 28.
14 comments:
Dear Dr. Tsai,
Thank you for taking time to answer our questions about your article.
I was most interested in how "interest experience is partly determined by individual characteristics such as gender..." (p. 461), yet the findings are that "there were no significant effects of gender or school grades on interest in the subject" (p. 467). You briefly mention that this could be because some students may have reported higher on their perceived autonomy-supportive environments, but can you further explain why there was no effect regarding gender and interest especially since at another point in the article you explain that typically females are interested in different areas than males (p. 461)?
Could this perhaps be based on culture, family, or home lifestyle?
I really appreciate your time and energy and thank you for your participation in our class. Your article addresses a really interesting area in my opinion and you mention in your discussion that this provides evidence that we can now observe interest and engagement in classrooms (as opposed to laboratories), which I find inspiring for future research.
You also say that the evidence “challenges the beliefs of some teachers that many students are just not interested and cannot be motivated;” I think your article suggests that if a student is not interested in a subject matter, their situational interest can be increased… is this correct? And I wonder how this information is applied practically. There is a unique challenge in learning the interests of students and incorporating those interests. It seems part of your answer to this is autonomy… do have any classroom examples of how a teacher might obtain information about student interest and then how he or she might apply it?
Dr. Tsai,
Just today, I was reading
Ainley, J., Bills, L. Wilson, K. (2005. Designing spreadsheet-based tasks for purposeful algebra. International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning, 10.
Ainley's term "purposeful" is defined as "having an outcome that has some value or interest for the student". Her claim is that if students are given such a goal before the learning takes place, they will be more interested in the learning process. I equate this with your concept of cognitive autonomy support.
I teach Mathematics and Physics at a community college. My question is "Would you expect that freshman college students to be less dependent on the teacher to provide autonomy support because the students have matured and amassed more varied interests in the 5 years since they were in the 7th grade?"
Thank you for contributing to our learning experience. It is a pleasure to converse with you.
Dear Dr. Tsai,
Thank you so much for participating in our discussion about interest.
In the article you mentioned "catch and flow," I am familiar with this concept because we discussed it in our motivation class. In the article it was mentioned that there were several situational factors that teachers could apply such as food, games, and puzzles to enhance students' involvement and interest or "catch" them. Isn't there a danger of this leading to the development of extrinsic motivation in students instead of intrinsic motivation?
I look forward to your response. Thank you.
Dear Dr. Tsai,
My question is about the function of student’s "prior experience outside the classroom.” Although, you mentioned in the limitation section of your paper that future research should be done at different points in student development, I would like to know your opinion about perhaps using different subject areas in the future.
Does the fact that the students in the sample were academically tracked by their earlier performance levels in math, German and possibly in a foreign language (English) into gymnasiums poses a problem?
These students somehow already did better than others in these subject areas, thus, it is likely that their personal interest, self-efficacy and interest experiences are already heightened and positive. Not to mention that both grades and actual skills (expository writing, chemistry etc.) in these subject in the gymnasium are likely to influence students academic future as they prepare for university exams.
Looking forward to your comments.
Dear Dr. Tsai,
Thank you for taking the time to interact with our class and contribute to our quest for knowledge.
If a student is not interested in the subject matter and their interest can be increased if the parent, teacher or mentor shows great enthusiasm or support for that subject. Would that interest then become permanent or would it remain transient and situational? Additionally how does societal, parental and cultural expectations impact the individuals interests?
Thank you so much for being a part of our learning experience. It is indeed a great honor.
The question I have is I am trying to put more autonomy in my classroom but I am struggling with the concept of how to provide the right amount of scaffolding to each student. The class is for all business majors and students who vary in prior knowledge and interest in the subject.
Hello Dr. Tsai,
My daughter is a 7th grader, and after reading your article I decided to talk with her about a school project and listen to her replies through the lens of interest theory.
She and a classmate are tasked with writing a book on one history subject (teacher-selected), based on individual textbook summaries and notes taken during movies and online research. I asked her how interested she is in completing this project. She said she is very interested in writing this book well because it will be "published" by the teacher and read by other classmates, that she has "no interest in the actual subject," but she and her co-author want to "learn enough about the subject to make it sound like a real book." She has successfully written project books for other classes and takes pride in this type of work.
This seems like an example of a student being sensitive to the learning conditions afforded by the teacher while being challenged with uninteresting content and motivated by a personally interesting task. While the external pressure is the public nature of the product, she doesn't seem to experience negative mood or negative interest. Thus, it appears that enjoying the book making task mediates any negative direction for mastering the content.
Dr. Tsai,
Thank you participating in our online discussion. It's a pleasure to have access to your knowledge base.
In the discussion section of this study, it was mentioned that the findings of this study suggested that lessons where students' prior knowledge was activated contributed to overall student enjoyment. If you were to build up this study, would you consider collecting further data to explore the role that prior knowledge plays in the individual and situational interest of learners?
Dear Dr. Tsai,
I am interested and perplexed by something from some of the results discussed in the "Examining Variation in the Effects of Situational Factors
Across Students" on page 468. You describe that the range for autonomy-
supportive climate in mathematics lessons includes negative values, indicating that for some students an autonomy-supportive environment could descrese interest experience. Is there any theoretical basis for why this might be? Are there some students who respond negatively to situational factors (autonomy-supportive climate, con-
trolling behavior, and cognitive autonomy) and why might this be? (Feel free to speculate if there are not empirical data on this question.)
Thanks greatly,
Shannon
Dr. Tsai
Thank you for participating in this dialogue with our class. Your article mentions "that the effects of autonomy-supportive climate, cognitive autonomy support, and perceived controlling behaviors on interest experience vary substantially between students." You also state that interest also differs for an individual student from one lesson to another.
I would think that these findings pose quite a problem for teachers. True, students appear to be "sensitive to the learning conditions" of the classroom, but how can an instructor consistently create an environment that works for all of the students (or at least most of them most of the time?) You mention that the challenge is to create an interesting and motivating learning environment. Could you expand on this?
Thanks.
Dear Dr. Tsai,
I really liked the article about what makes lessons interesting. I really liked that this study was conducted an actual classrooms. What I'm a bit confused about is what exactly the teachers were doing? What kind of lessons proved to be more interesting or not interesting to students? Also, could the teacher have effected the outcomes. If a student has a more favorable view point towards the teacher themselves, couldn't that effect the interest levels in the activities/lectures? I'm not sure if that was all really taken into account.
Dr. Tsai,
This was a very thought provoking article—thank you. I found that the results suggest many practical implications for teacher education as well as professional development. As one who works in teacher education I found the topic of controlling behaviors particularly relevant. "with teachers as instructors and students as "receivers" often leads teachers to neglect students' needs for autonomy and to resort to overly directive and controlling instructional behaviors." p. 462. In my observations of and work with pre-service and probationary teachers [both new to the field] I have noted the controlling instructional behaviors described in your study and often wonder if this is a function of limited experience and their own limited sense of autonomy. I appreciate the delineation of surface level instructional practices from interactional level practices to increase student interest. The surface level practices (e.g. the use of games) would be relatively easy for a novice teacher to implement. My question is about interactional level changes— is there a correlation between experience and a teacher's ability to provide an autonomy supportive environment? Would the suggestion that teachers receive training in autonomy-supportive teaching perhaps be more beneficial at a professional development stage as opposed to a pre-service stage? I appreciate your expertise in this area.
Dr. Tsai,
I understand that you mentioned that these traits appear stable for the class, but have you had a chance to examine the stability if the teacher or instructor change is made?
Thank you for your time.
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