A short instrument to assess topic interest in multimedia research Ahmet Murat UZUN, Ph.D.

Rationale Although various factors may be involved, one reason leading to low motivation is lack of interest. Interest was defined as “the psychological state of engaging or the predisposition to reengage with particular classes of objects, events, or ideas over time” (Hidi & Renninger, 2006, p. 112). To stress the role of interest, first, the nature of the relationship between cognitive and no cognitive factors of learning such as affect and motivation should be clarified. When explaining learning, we cannot solely depend on cognitive or rationale models of human perception.

Rationale Interest plays an important role of elaborating the attended information (Hidi, 1990), it may impact which parts of information that we should give importance to learn, while ignoring the others. Interest can impact cognitive affective processes such as active engagement, attention allocation, and use of learning strategy, and quality of emotion during learning (Schiefele, 1991; Schraw & Lehman, 2001).

Types of interest Interest is regarded as both individual predisposition and a psychological state in the literature (Ainley, Hidi, & Berndorff, 2002). Accordingly, research on interest has been mostly conceptualized under two components: individual interest and situational interest (Ainley, Hidi, & Berndorff, 2002; Hidi, 1990; Schiefele, 1991). Individual interest (topic interest) refers to relatively enduring personal disposition towards certain topics, activities or events to engage in that topics, activities or events. On the other hand, situational interest corresponds to the emotional state caused by certain elements of situational stimulants (Ainley, Hidi, & Berndorff, 2002; Hidi, 1990; Schiefele, 1991).

Types of interest Whereas individual interest focuses on the effect of personal preferences, situational interest deals with the interestingness of a situation that might influence cognitive performance (Hidi, 1990). Studies to make multimedia materials “more interesting” by adding interesting design elements mostly dealt with situational interest, or the “interestingness” of the multimedia materials. That is, situational characteristics of multimedia materials such as interesting text, pictures, sound, etc. have been investigated. When topic interest was taken into the consideration, the moderating effect of topic interest between interesting details and learning was obtained (Schehl, 2012).

Method Participants and context The study group consisted of 103 7th grade students enrolled at a middle school in the city of Afyonkarahisar, Turkey. The mean age of the participants was 12. For the Turkish adaptation of the topic interest scale, the English form of the scale, which was developed one of the prominent scholars working on topic interest (Schiefele, 1991), was used. the most recent and present form of the scale could be used for this purpose (Schiefele & Schaffner, 2014, a short instrument to assess topic interest in text comprehension research).

Participants and context The scale consisted of 7 items which are related to personal significance of the topic to participants. Participants rate their topic interest based 5 points Likert scale ranging from 1 (“not at all true for me”) and 5 (“completely true for me”). “The content of the text (the card trick) is interesting to me”, “I think I’ll enjoy working with this text”, “I find the subject of this text exciting”, “I would read something with a similar topic voluntarily”, “It is important to me, to learn something about this subject”, “I’ll probably like to be engaged with this subject”, “This subject is of personal relevance for me”.

Results Results showed that Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value was .84 and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity was statistically significant (p = .000) at p < .05 level suggesting that the factorability of the correlation matrix was met. Principal component analysis was used to reveal the factor structure of the scale. As expected, Factor extraction resulted in 1 dimension with eigen value greater than 1. The factor explained 53.95 % of the total variance Since only1 factor solution was suggested, factor rotation was not implemented.

Results In addition to construct validity, Cronbach Alpha coefficient was computed to determine the internal consistency of the sub scale. the scales which have the value of .70 or greater are sufficient for the reliability analysis. Alpha coefficient was calculated .85 for the total scale.

Discussion and Conclusion The purpose of this study was to adapt a short instrument to assess topic interest in multimedia research into Turkish context. The scale was originally developed by (Schiefele & Schaffner, 2014, a short instrument to assess topic interest in text comprehension research).to investigate participants’ topic interest towards “the card trick” topic. Exploratory factor analyses showed that the adapted scale reflected good validity and reliability evidence.