I reckon if they substituted cognitive load for boredom they would get a result teachers could more easily act on. Thinking expertise reversal as well as overload. Plenty of research on CL and motivation.
My former colleague who was utterly frustrated trying to teach Romeo and Juliet to his 9th graders could have benefitted from your five recommendations. Instead, he emphatically closed the text after the marriage scene, declaring: And they lived happily ever after!
Another factor, I think, is cultural: How much does the culture of a classroom/school/district expect of students? Can students get by with minimal effort? Or do schools have high behavior and academic expectations that encourage engagement?
“Motivation is not a fixed state. We need more sophisticated, adaptive (and dare I say it, domain-specific) approaches to motivation in learning rather than simplistic “boredom prevention” strategies through fuzzy concepts like engagement.”
Another possible reason that students who are initially bored become more interested occurs to me and it is to do with instructional methods. Tasks that students may report as being ‘boring’ (such as reading challenging texts, achieving fluency in recall of fundamental concepts) may build knowledge more effectively. Therefore, over time, students can make sense of the concepts taught more readily, which means they become more interested. It’s a sort of expertise effect - the more we know about something, the more interesting new information on that topic becomes. Conversely, more ‘engaging’ teaching methods (ie methods that prioritise making the topic grab students’ attention) may backfire as learning is minimal and content taught later is harder to understand: the temptation of ‘fun’ activities to introduce topics.
I reckon if they substituted cognitive load for boredom they would get a result teachers could more easily act on. Thinking expertise reversal as well as overload. Plenty of research on CL and motivation.
My former colleague who was utterly frustrated trying to teach Romeo and Juliet to his 9th graders could have benefitted from your five recommendations. Instead, he emphatically closed the text after the marriage scene, declaring: And they lived happily ever after!
Another factor, I think, is cultural: How much does the culture of a classroom/school/district expect of students? Can students get by with minimal effort? Or do schools have high behavior and academic expectations that encourage engagement?
“Motivation is not a fixed state. We need more sophisticated, adaptive (and dare I say it, domain-specific) approaches to motivation in learning rather than simplistic “boredom prevention” strategies through fuzzy concepts like engagement.”
Another possible reason that students who are initially bored become more interested occurs to me and it is to do with instructional methods. Tasks that students may report as being ‘boring’ (such as reading challenging texts, achieving fluency in recall of fundamental concepts) may build knowledge more effectively. Therefore, over time, students can make sense of the concepts taught more readily, which means they become more interested. It’s a sort of expertise effect - the more we know about something, the more interesting new information on that topic becomes. Conversely, more ‘engaging’ teaching methods (ie methods that prioritise making the topic grab students’ attention) may backfire as learning is minimal and content taught later is harder to understand: the temptation of ‘fun’ activities to introduce topics.