The Role of Students' Situational Interest in Classroom Learning: An Empirical Study based on both Laboratory and Naturalistic Paradigms

Abstract

Interest has always been an important research object in the field of education. Moreover, understanding the role of interest in students classroom learning is conducive to teaching practices. By constructing a theoretical model of interest based on relevant theories and prior empirical evidence, this study examined the differences within research paradigms and explored the potential function of neurophysiological signals in representing students interest in learning. In both laboratory and naturalistic paradigms, self-report and neurophysiological data were collected from 10th graders of an urban secondary school in Beijing, China. Through the data-driven approach of machine learning, the neurophysiological data were employed to fit self-report situational interest, and relevant theoretical models were examined based on all data using structural equation modeling. The path coefficients in the models were subsequently compared to determine the similarities and differences between the two paradigms. Combined with the results of multiple linear regressions established via machine learning, this study demonstrates the ability of neurophysiological data to represent situational interest.