Motivating Active Learning: A Design Framework for Interest-Driven Learning

Interest is increasingly being recognized as an effective motivator for learning, however neither the constructivist learning environment design literature nor the motivation research literature directly address the challenges of designing interest-driven learning activities. In this paper, we present a design framework for the creation of learning activities that draw on interest as their primary source of motivation. This Interest-Driven Learning design framework is the embodiment of a theory that addresses two challenges to the large-scale implementation of interest-driven learning. These challenges are coverage, the difficulty of motivating the wide range of learning objectives valued by our educational system with interest, and strength, the variation over time and across learners of the motivational strength of interest in a particular topic or activity. The Interest-Driven Learning framework is based on a novel categorization of motivational constructs into interest and context-based motivators. Common sense and cognitive theory concur: Interest and engagement lead to robust learning. Translating that recognition into clear principles for learning environment design is a complex problem. How can materials, teachers, peer groups, and activity structures be designed to capitalize on interest as a motivation to learn? This question exposes a critical gap between the literature on the design of constructivist learning environments and the educational psychology literature on motivation. Recent research on constructivist learning environment design has argued for the motivational importance of authentic, interesting tasks and contexts (e. The motivation research literature describes the value of the same kind of motivation in studies and in theoretical work regarding interest. However, neither literature