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The objective of the three studies presented here was to investigate how situational interest is related to knowledge acquisition. Situational interest is construed as a motivational response to a perceived knowledge deficit. It is triggered in situations where this knowledge deficit becomes manifest, such as in the confrontation with a problem. In Study 1 we manipulated prior knowledge of 32 secondary-school students about a particular problem (i.e., reasons for the conquest of Singapore by the Japanese during the Second World War). Only students who lacked the appropriate knowledge showed an increase in situational interest after the problem was presented. In Study 2 (N = 60), students who showed awareness that they lacked knowledge to understand a problem (i.e., causes of erosion of an island) showed increased situational interest in that problem. In Study 3 (N = 86), situational interest and knowledge acquisition were monitored over the course of a 3-h lesson in a natural classroom. We were able to demonstrate that situational interest decreased with increasing knowledge of the problem-at-hand. We argue that the findings support a knowledge-deprivation account of situational interest. Our findings are at variance with the broadly held conviction that situational interest and knowledge necessarily influence each other positively. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: It has become common practice for people to multitask with electronic devices in everyday situations. We examined the effects of interrupting participants with instant messages while they watched a video presentation in a situation that resembled commonplace events such as a business meeting, a training presentation, or a classroom lecture. We compared them to participants who were not interrupted. We also investigated how interest in the topics presented affected learning. Results showed that interruptions reduced learning, by a small but statistically significant margin, which is consistent with the findings of similar studies. Importantly, interest level was as strong a predictor of learning as being interrupted, although interest did not moderate the effect of interruptions. Results showed that interruptions are disruptive but perhaps not as much as is commonly believed. The results also highlight the importance of studying individual difference factors, such as interest levels, in conjunction with experimental manipulations, when assessing the effects of multitasking. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] Young infants preferentially attend to their mother's face. [•] We examine maternal factors and the mother-face preference at 3.5-months. [•] 57% of mothers in this community sample exhibited some symptoms of emotional distress. [•] Infants’ mother-face interest is associated with maternal psychological health. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Sustained attention (i.e., focusing attention on an activity for a prolonged amount of time) has important implications for learning and memory. However, little is known regarding the behavioural factors that contribute to sustained attention during Internet learning. The primary purpose of the current study was to explore differences in navigational choices and recovery from unsuccessful actions of learners with high and low levels of sustained attention. Undergraduate students searched the Internet for information corresponding to an assigned low domain knowledge topic for 20min while their eye-gaze was recorded. High- and low-attending learners differed in the selection of links, level of linearity used to navigate the Internet, Web reading strategies, and frequency of deploying unsuccessful actions. These results indicate that sustained attention may be impacted by the monitoring of one’s progress towards the learning goal, and have implications for scaffolding provided by teachers and adaptive hypermedia systems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Recent research, treating interest as an emotion, indicates the cognitive appraisals of novelty-complexity and coping potential predict interest. This appraisal-based model of interest has not yet been applied to educational research. The present study evaluated the significance of the model regarding the activity of reading expository, academic-oriented text, and assessed whether a third previously untested appraisal of goal relevance could predict interest as well. Sixty-five undergraduate psychology students, 41 females and 24 males, completed several instruments—assessments of interest and three appraisals across time, experimental texts, and a measure trait curiosity as a control variable. Goal relevance, was shown to predict interest across the sample to a statistically significant degree (Unstandardized β=.567; t =6.258; p <.001), displaying more predictive power than the combined effects of the original two appraisals. These results and the study''s implications are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Color coding has been proposed to promote more effective learning. However, insufficient evidence currently exists to show how color coding leads to better learning. The goal of this study was to investigate the underlying cause of the color coding effect by utilizing eye movement data. Fifty-two participants studied either a color-coded or conventional format of multimedia instruction. Eye movement data were collected during the study. The results indicate that color coding increased retention and transfer performance. Enhancement of learning by color coding was due to efficiency of locating corresponding information between illustration and text. Color coding also attracted attention of learners to perceptually salient information. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

According to the modality effect in multimedia, a text accompanying a picture should be auditorily presented instead of visually in order to avoid split of attention. In two experimental studies (34 and 78 participants, respectively), the impact and possible compensatory effects of two aptitude variables, that is, memory strategy skills and working memory capacity, on multimedia learning were tested. Aptitude–treatment–interaction effects were found with respect to comprehension (Study 1) and transfer (Study 2). The modality effect was confirmed for less-skilled learners in memory strategy use but not for highly skilled ones. Memory strategy skills and working memory capacity differentially affected multimedia learning, depending on task features and demands. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In a typical application of association rule learning from market basket data, a set of transactions for a fixed period of time is used as input to rule learning algorithms. For example, the well-known Apriori algorithm can be applied to learn a set of association rules from such a transaction set. However, learning association rules from a set of transactions is not a one time only process. For example, a market manager may perform the association rule learning process once every month over the set of transactions collected through the last month. For this reason, we will consider the problem where transaction sets are input to the system as a stream of packages. The sets of transactions may come in varying sizes and in varying periods. Once a set of transactions arrive, the association rule learning algorithm is executed on the last set of transactions, resulting in new association rules. Therefore, the set of association rules learned will accumulate and increase in number over time, making the mining of interesting ones out of this enlarging set of association rules impractical for human experts. We refer to this sequence of rules as “association rule set stream” or “streaming association rules” and the main motivation behind this research is to develop a technique to overcome the interesting rule selection problem. A successful association rule mining system should select and present only the interesting rules to the domain experts. However, definition of interestingness of association rules on a given domain usually differs from one expert to another and also over time for a given expert. This paper proposes a post-processing method to learn a subjective model for the interestingness concept description of the streaming association rules. The uniqueness of the proposed method is its ability to formulate the interestingness issue of association rules as a benefit-maximizing classification problem and obtain a different interestingness model for each user. In this new classification scheme, the determining features are the selective objective interestingness factors related to the interestingness of the association rules, and the target feature is the interestingness label of those rules. The proposed method works incrementally and employs user interactivity at a certain level. It is evaluated on a real market dataset. The results show that the model can successfully select the interesting ones. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The re-analysis is aimed at extending earlier findings on example-based learning and to draw consequences for further research and instructional practice. Based on an earlier experimental study on learning with worked-out examples in the domain of accounting (n=56 students of a vocational school), we re-analysed the effects of an intervention means (elaboration training) on learning behaviour (aspects of example elaboration). In a further step. different ways of dealing with worked-out examples (elaboration profiles) were identified and related to the subsequent learning outcomes and to the learners' mental effort. We explained the formation of different elaboration profiles by various learner characteristics (prior knowledge, interest and tolerance of ambiguity). It was shown that the elaboration training had a positive effect on the quality of example elaboration. Two ways of learning-effective example elaboration were identified. Subgroups of learners with different elaboration profiles differed in mental effort and in tolerance of ambiguity, but not with respect to prior knowledge and interest. High tolerance of ambiguity concurred with high mental effort and resulted in effective, meta-cognitively accentuated example elaboration. By integrating cognitive and motivational characteristics in the analysis of elaboration patterns, new insights concerning example-based learning and the role mental effort plays in this context could be won. Consequences for research and instructional practice were drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]