Understanding Situational vs. Individual Interest

If you want to build great learning experiences, learn to differentiate these types of interest

If you have ever designed any kind of learning experience, you probably thought about how to increase your learner's interest.

There is no shortage of strategies, tactics, and hacks to choose from here, but quite often they fail. One reason is that they fail to differentiate between different kinds of interests. Here is one mental model that will help you do better:

• Situational Interest is the interest generated by the learning environment itself. You may have a lot of control over that. However, it's also ephemeral and transient; it lasts only so long as the learning situation lasts.

• Individual Interest is the intrinsic motivation to learn a topic that each learner brings — and that they will bring again next week. It is way more stable, but also harder to affect.

When you think about interest in these two categories, loads of interesting questions open up: For example, can you boost individual interest to the point that a rather uninteresting learning environment doesn't matter? Can you enhance the learning environment so much that even learners who bring very little individual interest are happy to engage?

For further reading, I recommend these papers:

• 📝 Increasing Situational Interest in the Classroom

• 📝 Situational Interest: A Review of the Literature and Directions for Future Research

Let's use this to build more interesting learning experiences.