Effective Teaching Methods
Offer Meaningful Choices
Promotes self-determination because it satisfies students' need for independence and freedom.
Increases students' interest.
Less-knowledgeable or less-self-regulated students should be helped to make choices.
Teachers should give feedback about how students' choices went.
Use Well-Organized Texts
Coherent and informationally complete texts are related to interest and learning in text.
Teachers should provide useful background knowledge about the text, given that knowledge and coherence make separate contributions.
Select Texts That Are Vivid
Vivid texts consist of rich imagery, suspense, provocative information, and engaging themes.
Positive impact on interest and learning .
Texts that have irrelevant or highly seductive information can interfere with learning by diverting attention from important parts of the text.
Use Texts That Students Know About
Prior knowledge increases interest and deepens learning.
Two strategies to promote interest:
Use texts that are familiar to majority of the students - Familiarity with texts allows students to develop thematic inferences in the text and between the text and prior knowledge.
Give background information on the text to help students better understand what they are assigned - can either be done by the teacher or small group discussions.
Encourage Students To Be Active Listeners
Students who make meaning learn more information at a deeper level.
Interest increases active learning and vise versa.
Strategies to help students become more active in their learning:
Use particular learning strategies (example: predicting and summarizing).
Use general study strategies where students reflect on what they already know, want to know, and have learned.
Provide Relevance Cues For Students
Knowing what is important to the learning task beforehand increases interest and learning.
Teachers should highlight important themes and information before students begin to read and study.
Strategies for highlighting important information:
Focus on personal reading goals that students set before reading.
Help clarify to students what is important to the reading task.
Ask students to focus on casual claims.
Ask students to explain the text to other students.
Citation:
Schraw, Gregory, et al. “Increasing Situational Interest in the Classroom.” Educational Psychology Review, vol. 13, 2001, pp. 211–224. 3, https://learningandexperienceblog.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/schraw_flowerday_lehman01.pdf.