The role of school in adolescents’ interest in daily life

Highlights

• Aim to provide a nuanced understanding of the role of school in interest.

• An experience sampling method was used to study interest experiences.

• School was reflected in interest in three different ways.

• Adolescents relate to school in idiosyncratic ways.

Abstract

Questioning adolescents’ reported lack of interest in school, this study aims to present a more nuanced understanding than previously described of the role of school in adolescents’ interests in daily life. We scrutinized 7240 interest experiences reported by 44 adolescents using an experience sampling smartphone application inTin. Our analysis revealed that adolescents referred to school in their interest experiences in three ways, reporting interest in school, interest at school, and interest after school. Adolescents differed in the extent to which their interest experiences reflected these ways. One adolescent did not mention school in her interest experiences at all. We provide directions for adolescents’ interest research as well as educational practice, including for teachers to connect to adolescents’ interests.

Introduction

School is typically not seen as the object of interest for adolescents or as a context for developing interest. There are ample studies from all over the world (e.g. U.S., Italy, Senegal, Korea, Japan) reporting that adolescents experience high levels of boredom, low intrinsic motivation and other negative affect when participating in school (see Larson & Verma, 1999). These findings can be considered worrisome, not only because adolescents spend a quarter to a half of their waking hours in school (Larson & Verma, 1999), but also because lack of interest in school has been associated with low academic engagement and achievement over time (Lumby, 2011; Pekrun, Goetz, Daniels, Stupnisky, & Perry, 2010). Research even reports that interest in school tends to decline with age, especially in adolescence (e.g. Barmby, Kind, & Jones, 2008; Frenzel, Goetz, Pekrun, & Watt, 2010; Potvin & Hasni, 2014).

Yet, when examining these results, an alternative explanation could be that these findings are the result of studies focusing on aggregated results in adolescent populations (e.g. adolescents’ averaged interest levels), instruments that predefine particular objects (e.g. chemistry, Krapp, 2002) and contexts of interest (e.g. at school, Barron, 2006). By asking adolescents to self-define their interests, report their individual interest experiences throughout daily life and analyzing these from a person-centered perspective (Akkerman & Bakker, 2019), this article aims to shed a different light on the role of school in interest.

Historically, interest is defined as a predisposition to re-engage with a particular object, or a psychological state characterized by an affective component of positive emotion and a cognitive component of concentration (Hidi & Renninger, 2006; Renninger & Hidi, 2017, p. 16). Interest is seen as a product of continuous interaction between an individual and his or her environment (Hidi & Renninger, 2006; Krapp, 2002). Typically, interest research has described the development of interest as an ongoing process that starts with the interest being triggered in a particular situation. This so-called situational interest may gradually develop into an interest pursued by the individual (i.e. grow towards an individual interest, Hidi & Renninger, 2006). Persistent engagement with an object of interest over time depends on one’s experiences with the object of interest, for example the attribution of value or positive feelings towards the object (e.g. Renninger & Hidi, 2017). Whereas situational interest reflects engagement in a specific content at a particular point in time (i.e. a ‘fleeting’ interest), individual interest refers to a person’s predisposition to re-engage with specific content.

Different scholars have questioned characterizing interests by such a dichotomy, both on conceptual (Akkerman & Bakker, 2019; Azevedo, 2011; 2013; 2018; Barron, 2006) and empirical (e.g. Akkerman, Vulperhorst, & Akkerman, 2019; Draijer, Bakker, Slot, & Akkerman, 2020; Knogler, Harackiewicz, Gegenfurtner, & Lewalter, 2015; Tsai, Kunter, Lüdtke, Trautwein, & Ryan, 2008) grounds. Scholars guided by life-wide, ecological approaches on interest have provided new insights into the complex nature of interest, together illustrating how interests are part of everyday life (e.g. Akkerman & Bakker, 2019; Azevedo, 2011; 2013; 2018; Barron, 2006; 2010; Bergin, 2016; Hofer, 2010). Basically, anything in daily life may trigger and sustain interest, being connected to the social, material and cultural opportunities that family, school and peer contexts provide for interest emergence and growth. Accordingly, adolescents’ interest experiences, or engagement with a particular object (i.e. being a topic, activity, artefact, event, and/or idea) in a particular situation (Akkerman & Bakker, 2019), materialize in moving throughout their daily lives.

Whereas experiencing interest in school has been associated with increased levels of motivation and achievement, research has repeatedly shown that adolescents often do not experience school as interesting (Shernoff, Csikszentmihalyi, Schneider, & Shernoff, 2014; Larson & Richards, 1991). This negative trend may be the result of focusing on describing the interests of the adolescent population as a whole (Krapp & Prenzel, 2011; Krapp, 2000, 2002; Ufer, Rach, & Kosiol, 2017) as well as by questioning adolescents about predefined objects in school, typically in terms of school subjects like physics or chemistry or associated topics (Krapp, 2002). Previous research has already shown how adolescents may differ in what they experience as interesting, and how their interests may develop in idiosyncratic ways. A study by Ufer et al. (2017) on adolescents’ interest in the object of ‘mathematics’ has shown that when asking adolescents questions like “to what extent do you like mathematics?”, the unique character and structure of a person-object relation remains underexposed. For example, where one adolescent might like solving word problems, another adolescent might be more interested in algebraic computations. Moreover, a study by Krapp and Lewalter (2001) on job-related interests has shown that while the average level of interest decreases over the years, focusing on intraindividual processes showed a positive trend, namely that adolescents all reported to have discovered new areas of interest. Hence, in order to shed a more nuanced light on the role of school in adolescents’ interests, it would be useful to center adolescents’ interest experiences in daily life (Frenzel et al., 2010; Krapp & Prenzel, 2011; Krapp, 2000, 2002; Ufer et al., 2017; Valsiner, 1992).

In studies adopting a person-centered perspective, adolescents self-report their moment-to-moment interest experiences and self-define the objects of interest they engage in, where objects of interest may refer to anything in a person’s life space (e.g. topics, activities, material tools, ideas, or events; Krapp, 2000, 2002). Recent studies have already revealed how valuable it can be to take such a person-centered perspective (Akkerman & Bakker, 2019; Azevedo, 2013; Barron, 2010). For example, Slot, Akkerman, and Wubbels (2019) demonstrated that, when adolescents self-report their objects of interest, school is reflected in 25 % of the objects of interest, indicating that adolescents are indeed to some degree interested in school. Also, a study by Akkerman et al. (2019) described the multiple ways in which school interests can be experienced by adolescents, where school was hardly represented as a well-developed, individual interest. Still, little is known on the specific ways school can be related to adolescents’ daily interest experiences.

School is often considered a practice that may distract adolescents from pursuing their interests (Shernoff et al., 2014), whereas at the same time school is held responsible for supporting adolescents’ identity development and interest in learning (e.g. Biesta & Pols, 2012). Indeed, research has found that despite school being difficult, it can play a role in triggering and developing interest through aspects of the learning materials (Hidi, 1990; Hofer, 2010; Knogler et al., 2015; Mitchell, 1993; Schiefele, Krapp, & Winteler, 1992; Tsai et al., 2008) as well as by organizing field trips and other co-curricular activities like sports, drama and music. These activities are generally seen as extensions of or complementary to the academic learning program, i.e. the curriculum (Fredricks et al., 2002; Verhoeven, Poorthuis, & Volman, 2019) and in the context of this study is not seen as different from extra-curricular activities. Renninger, Bachrach, & Hidi (2019) recently reported that in order to trigger interest in learning, triggers “related to the self, such as personal relevance, ownership, and character identification, may be more universal than other triggers” (p. 11). This shows the importance of self-identification with the learning content, and that interest is likely to be maintained if learners are aware of their learning process (i.e. what am I working towards and where am I in the process). At the same time, these scholars stressed that triggering interest is more complex than often regarded by researchers, and school should not just ‘insert’ triggers into the classroom as this will not have the aspired effects.

Co-curricular activities might be likely to provide opportunities for triggering or developing interests. They tend to be similar to the structure of leisure activities as they typically provide more degrees of freedom for adolescents to choose their what, how and why of doing particular activities (Hofer, 2010). Also, they might have a positive impact on adolescents’ development of self (Feldman & Matjasko, 2005), for example because they may develop competencies that are related to collaboration, time management, and self-discipline/regulation (Larson, 2000).

Although educational research typically describes school in terms of a curriculum and co-curriculum that is taught by teachers with a deliberate intention towards validating learning (Bronkhorst & Akkerman, 2016), for adolescents school is about more than that, like socializing with peers (Bergin, 2016). Peer relationships are essential for adolescents: they tend to spend more time with their peers than parents, even outside school, but have most contact with peers during school hours (Kleiber et al., 2014). There is some research that showed that adolescents engage in many school-related activities like arts and athletics because they have strong social goals (i.e. want to be with friends or make friends) (Fredricks et al., 2002). Hence, we expect that in addition to the curricular and co-curricular content, there may be other ways in which school might be reflected in adolescents’ interest experiences.

Moreover, research from an ecological perspective has indicated that interests have the potential to extend initial time and place, and may thus be experienced across contexts (e.g. Slot et al., 2019). For example, thought processes initiated at school may extend to other contexts (Bronkhorst & Akkerman, 2016). This has been shown for fieldtrips (Rajala & Akkerman, 2017), schoolwork at home (2014, Hedegaard, 2012) and when interacting with family during dinner (Barron, 2006). In line with this notion of interest experience(s) across-contexts, Phelan, Davidson, and Cao (1991) reported how some adolescents find it difficult to make connections between home and school in terms of who they are and what they like to spend their time on. As a result, adapting to the school demands might be difficult, often resulting in disengagement from school in general. Although research has reported on ways to (re)establish continuity between in- and out-of-school contexts (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011; Bronkhorst & Akkerman, 2016), teachers can find it hard to connect to the unique backgrounds, abilities and expertise that adolescents bring to the classroom.

By investigating how school is reflected in adolescents’ interest experiences in daily life, we expect that the role of school in interest will become visible in a more extended and nuanced way than previously described. In order to increase our understanding on this matter, we will use an experience sampling method to grasp all interest experiences that arise in daily life and which potentially reflect adolescents’ idiosyncratic ways of relating their interests to school. The research question we posed, was: how is school reflected in adolescents’ interest experience(s) in daily life?