Students’ situational interest and perceived relevance during designed coherent physics learning modules

Recognising the importance of interest and relevance for learning, educators have strived to improve these elements in their instruction. This study explores how situational interest and perceived relevance vary over time and across instructional activities. Moreover, our aim was to analyse how individual interest, perceived relevance and instructional activities predict situational interest. We obtained two data sets (N = 129 and N = 126) from students participating in physics learning modules designed according to the ideas of coherent science instruction and used ANOVA, post-hoc tests and linear regression models for the analyses. We recognised significant differences in situational interest between the same types of instructional activities. Students predominantly associated the activities with the individual and societal dimensions of relevance. The regression models confirmed that relevance was a significant and strong predictor of situational interest, especially for calculation-related activities; individual interest did not predict situational interest in most situations. The predictive power of the modules heavily depended on the situations; model fits at the beginning of the modules were poor, but they improved in subsequent situations. Overall, the findings suggest that the context in which the instructional activities are situated is more important than the activities themselves.