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Maintaining learning engagement throughout adolescence is critical for long‐term academic success. This research sought to understand the role of metacognition and motivation in predicting adolescents' engagement in math learning over time. In two longitudinal studies with 2,325 and 207 adolescents (ages 11–15), metacognitive skills, interest, and self‐control each uniquely predicted math engagement. Additionally, metacognitive skills worked with interest and self‐control interactively to shape engagement. In Study 1, metacognitive skills and interest were found to compensate for one another. This compensatory pattern further interacted with time in Study 2, indicating that the decline in engagement was forestalled among adolescents who had either high metacognitive skills or high interest. Both studies also uncovered an interaction between metacognitive skills and self‐control, though with slightly different interaction patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study was to examine how individual interest and knowledge acquisition are causally related. Three hypotheses were tested using a cross-lagged panel analysis ( N = 186) and two quasi-experimental studies ( N = 68 and N = 108) involving students from schools in Singapore. The first hypothesis is the broadly shared standard assumption on the relation between individual interest and knowledge: the more an individual is interested in a topic, the more (s)he is willing to engage in learning. An alternative hypothesis assumes that individual interest is not the cause but the consequence of the process of learning: individual interest as an affective by-product of learning. Finally, a third possibility is that interest and knowledge influence each other reciprocally. The results supported the affective-by-product hypothesis. Our findings seem at variance with commonly held conceptions that being interested guides knowledge attainment. The implications of these findings for interest research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the pedagogic value of incorporating sophisticated interactivity features into lessons on hand-held devices. Engineering students (Experiment 1) and non-engineering college students (Experiment 2) spent 5 min studying an animation showing a six-step maintenance procedure for a mechanical device called a Power Take-Off presented on an iPad. In both experiments, students who received high interactivity (i.e., rotation through dragging movements and zoom through pinching movements) reported higher interest but did not show better learning as compared to the low interactivity group (i.e., pause and continue buttons on the touch screen) or no interactivity group. Across two experiments, the interactivity hypothesis was supported in terms of increased interest but not supported in terms of improved learning. Thus, there was not support for the idea that increasing situational interest through high levels of interactivity primes deeper learning processes that produce better learning outcomes. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two studies, we investigated infants’ preference for infant-directed (ID) action or ‘motionese’ ( Brand, Baldwin & Ashburn, 2002 ) relative to adult-directed (AD) action. In Study 1, full-featured videos were shown to 32 6- to 8-month-olds, who demonstrated a strong preference for ID action. In Study 2, infants at 6–8 months (n = 28) and 11–13 months (n = 24) were shown either standard ID and AD clips, or clips in which demonstrators’ faces were blurred to obscure emotional and eye-gaze information. Across both ages, infants showed evidence of preferring ID to AD action, even when faces were blurred. Infants did not have a preference for still-frame images of the demonstrators, indicating that the ID preference arose from action characteristics, not demonstrators’ general appearance. These results suggest that motionese enhances infants’ attention to action, possibly supporting infants’ learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, Frederick Schmitt and Reza Lahroodi explore the value of curiosity for inquiry and knowledge. They defend an appetitive account of curiosity, viewing curiosity as a motivationally original desire to know that arises from having one’s attention drawn to the object and that in turn sustains one’s attention to it. Distinguishing curiosity from wonder, the authors explore several sources of the epistemic value of curiosity. First, curiosity is tenacious: curiosity whether a proposition is true leads to curiosity about related issues, thereby deepening our knowledge. Second, it is to some extent biased in favor of topics in which we already have a practical or epistemic interest. Third, and most important, curiosity is largely independent of our interests: it fixes our attention on objects in which we have no antecedent interest, thereby broadening our knowledge. Schmitt and Lahroodi elucidate the value of curiosity by outlining its role in levels of development — an approach indebted to John Dewey’s explanation of the value of curiosity. Finally, they raise some questions about the implications of their account for educational practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Goal orientation is a multidimensional construct widely examined by social, organizational, educational, and sports psychology researchers. However, despite theoretical perspectives indicating that individuals can adopt or manifest more than one goal orientation simultaneously, researchers traditionally examine relationships between the goal orientation dimensions and outcome variables of interest independently. In contrast, this study was designed to examine whether individuals can be sorted into meaningful goal orientation profiles based on their scores on measures of learning, performance–approach, and performance–avoidance goal orientation, and the relationships between the resulting profiles and various dispositional and motivational variables. Our results indicated that a 4-profile solution best fit our data and that the 4 profiles differed uniquely across our dependent variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme is expected to produce knowledge of high social scientific quality and practical pedagogic value. It faces, in a particularly acute form, the issue of how confidence in its conclusions can be built. This article begins with some conceptual clarification of the notion of a ‘warrant’ for research findings and distinguishes between warrants in social research and warrants for educational policy and practice. It then, in the specific context of research on learning outcomes, proposes an integrated model that recognizes the importance of, and relationships among, criteria associated with research design and empirical work, theoretical coherence, relationship with other research, and user affirmation. It concludes by emphasizing the need for continuing debate about, and development of, the roles and relationships of ‘researchers’ and ‘users’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]