Research on Interest in Science: Theories, methods, and findings

By Andreas Krapp, Manfred Prenzel. 2011

818 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article presents an overview of interest research and describes the theoretical and methodological background for the assessment of interest in science in large‐scale assessments like the ‘Programme for International Student Assessment’ (PISA). The paper starts with a short retrospective on the history of interest, bringing out theoretical roots that help to understand recent discussions on interest in science education. As interest is a widely used concept with manifold facets, it is essential to discuss different ways of modelling the relationship between a person and a comprehensive object like science with all of its different aspects, including wide ranges of content as well as contexts. Models that can be used for describing the content structure of science interest and the process of interest development are presented. Based on an overview of typical methods for assessing interests, exemplary findings on students’ interest in science are presented, which play an important role in the current scientific debate. Finally, challenges for future research on interest in science education are discussed.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a917bb597a566a0f996645c090d0033fef89cb16

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Citations in the corpus

Adolescents' motivation to select an academic science-related career: the role of school factors, individual interest, and science self-concept (2013, background): “In the little time allocated to regular science lessons, there is not enough time to discuss a variety of different aspects of science, so that students may not have a chance to discover topics that they are enthusiastic about (Krapp & Prenzel, 2011).”
Process Account of Curiosity and Interest: A Reward-Learning Perspective (2018, background): “On the other hand, research on interest seems to be more diverse: Some researchers are mainly concerned with the maturity of this engagement process (i.e., how the feedback loop is completed; Alexander et al. 1995; Hidi and Renninger 2006; Krapp and Prenzel 2011), whereas some others focus more on e”
Studying Triggers for Interest and Engagement Using Observational Methods (2015, background): “Interest is a psychological variable that is always content- or object-specific, meaning that a person has an interest in a particular activity, set of questions, or field of study (see Krapp & Prenzel, 2011).”
Interest, motivation and attitude towards science and technology at K-12 levels: a systematic review of 12 years of educational research (2014, background): “Students and school science & technology: a relationship under tension and a need for research-based synthetic knowledge According to Krapp and Prenzel (2011), besides developmental or identity-based approaches, it is possible to tackle the problem of interest in S&T by supposing that its…”
Motivations to seek science videos on YouTube: free-choice learning in a connected society (2018, background): “Krapp and Prenzel (2011) described interest in science as an orientation to science content characterized by goal-related cognitions and positive affective states.”
Engaging in Science: A Feeling for the Discipline (2016, background): “Hidi and Renninger (2006) and Krapp (2002, 2007; Krapp & Prenzel, 2011) studied interest as a psychological state and a predisposition to engage in learning that develops and stabilizes over time.”
Revisiting the Conceptualization, Measurement, and Generation of Interest (2011, methodology): “Krapp and Prenzel (2011) described the need for effective measures that allow identification of both cognitive and affective components of interest.”
Effects of a classroom discourse intervention on teachers' practice and students' motivation to learn mathematics and science (2015, background): “The findings support those theories of interest development that propose situational interest as an antecedent of sustained individual interest and thus as a prerequisite for interest development (Hidi & Renninger, 2006; Krapp & Prenzel, 2011).”
Study choice and career development in STEM fields: an overview and integration of the research (2015, background): “…Empirical Longitudinal, qualitative 21/4 UK 13–17 Rasinen et al. (2009) Descriptive Finland and Germany Olszewski-Kubilius (2010) Descriptive US Halpern et al. (2011) Descriptive US Krapp and Prenzel (2011) Overview Whiston et al. (2011) Metaanalysis 16296 8–20 Van Aalderen-Smeets et al.…”
Analysis of the Decline in Interest Towards School Science and Technology from Grades 5 Through 11 (2014, background): “(Krapp and Prenzel 2011, pp. 43- 44) This very important invitation for differentiated analyses leads us to consider the results obtained by Barmby et al. (2008), in which, for grades 7 through 9, the construct ‘‘importance of science’’ did not decline yet ‘‘learning science in school’’ dropped…”
Science and Scientific Curiosity in Pre-school—The teacher's point of view (2013, background): “Scientific curiosity can be defined as a desire to understand and a quest for knowledge regarding natural phenomena (Krapp & Prenzel, 2011).”