Universality and Uniqueness of Students’ Situational Interest in Physical Education: A Comparative Study

Situational interest (SI) has been conceptualized in physical education (PE) as a multidimensional construct including five dimensions: instant enjoyment, exploration intention, attention demand, novelty and challenge. Consistent with Ding, Sun and Chen (2013), who argued for the need ‘to develop cross-culture models to examine the universality of the motivation constructs’, the purpose of this study was to investigate the universality and uniqueness of students’ SI by comparing three French-speaking PE contexts. Participants were 1812 secondary school students from Belgium, France, and Switzerland. They responded to the French 15-item SI scale and the Total Interest scale (Roure, Pasco & Kermarrec, 2016) after practicing learning tasks in regular PE lessons. The relationships between the SI dimensions and total interest were compared between the three samples using correlation and regression analyses. A multivariate analysis of variance was also used to compare SI scores between the contexts. The results revealed that instant enjoyment and exploration intention were the two major motivating dimensions, highlighting the universality of students’ SI, whereas challenge and novelty revealed the uniqueness of this construct explored.