CONCLUSIONES Y RECOMENDACIONES

As shown hereto, novelty is recognised as having an impact on behaviour. A central characteristic of situational interest is that it impacts levels of attention: novelty has been shown to have a clear relationship with attention from studies with infants and young children. Early studies have demonstrated that for example, infants attend more to unusual 3D shapes (more often reached for and looked at) than more familiar shapes (Gottfried et al., 1977). A study by Berlyne and Frommer (1966) reported that kindergarten children (grades 3 and 6) showed higher levels of interest, in terms of number of questions asked about novel and unfamiliar stories compared to familiar stories. These examples illustrate that, where novelty represents something that is outside the typical routine of young children, it has the potential to elicit changes in attention and may promote higher levels of interest. These studies also indicate that novelty is effective with young children when it is understood as something that is not routine. However, the extent to which attention is affected and any impact on how information is processed from the related activities is not known.

Berlyne developed a theory of collative motivation which has been very influential in establishing the links between collative variables, like novelty, and interestingness and affective response. It suggests that motivation is dependent on the collative properties of stimuli where factors such as novelty, surprisingness and complexity might affect level of arousal regardless of the content of the task or activity. Berlyne’s work seeks to establish an empirical base for his theory. For example, Berlyne (1963) investigated the relationship between novelty and interestingness by asking undergraduates to provide an immediate response on a 7-point likert scale of levels of interestingness or pleasingness found from looking at patterns that were categorised as either more or less irregular. Berlyne worked from the premise that the more irregular patterns would be rated as more interesting but less pleasing. Berlyne suggests that more irregular patterns increase arousal where the more uniform patterns limit this response. Berlyne’s further studies in this area (e.g. Berlyne, 1970) led him to conclude that novelty increases the attention paid to a stimulus. Interestingness increases with novelty but repeated exposure to a stimulus then leads to a decline in the effects. These studies support the theoretical view that situational interest can be triggered by a feature of the environment that leads to a rise in attention, they also highlight the challenges of situational interest, where factors such as novelty may have a fleeting effect only and are susceptible to a rapid falling off due to their inherent characteristics and the delicacy of motivation.

Several studies identify novelty as an important trigger for situational interest even though their primary aim was not evaluating novelty as a variable. Clearly such studies must be interpreted with caution as the investigations have not centred on novelty itself and therefore extrapolating potential support for its efficacy carries limitations and can be deleterious to building a strong evidence base for an understanding of how novelty is operationalised. Nonetheless, they do provide indications for where further research might be usefully directed as well as demonstrating potential effects of novelty. Gehlbach and colleagues (Gehlbach et al., 2008) investigated the effects of role-playing simulations to encourage interest in social studies with middle-school aged students. The researchers concluded that the increase in interest, as measured by a pre and post intervention self-ranking measure, was the result of either challenge or engagement in social perspective taking. However, the reported rise in levels of interest was not reflected in a rise in ratings of importance for the subject. The authors therefore posit that this was possibly the result of using self-report measures and the subsequent unreliability of the tool or, that actually the changes in interest were due to a resulting shift in intrinsic enjoyment

of the task borne from the experience of participating in novel activities in the lessons. They propose that it is this difference in activity type that alters interest levels. This would account for the fact that the participants experience an increase in interest level but not in their opinion of social studies. However, this should be interpreted with caution as it is highly speculative: although the authors put forward the concept of novelty as a cause for changes in participant interest, novelty was not directly examined in this task.

Similarly, in a study with 10-12 year olds (N = 52), investigating predictors and outcomes of situational interest in a science task (what the authors describe as ‘concreteness’), where the task characteristics were manipulated using a simulation program, Tapola, Veermans and Niemivirta (2013) report that, aside from the effects of their manipulation, the initial level of situational interest was high across both conditions. The authors propose that this is due to the novelty of the tasks, once again illustrating that novelty impacts interest levels for an activity.

A further study by Dobrow, Smith and Posner (2011), investigated the effect of grades on interest with MBA students in order to assess an intervention targeting the efficacy of choice as a potential trigger for cultivating subject interest. The study found a positive effect for choice. In their interpretation of the results, the researchers suggest that the findings are enhanced by the novelty of the intervention itself as well as the novelty of the role of the professor (different to the routine) in presenting the intervention. The resulting view of the researchers is that novelty may enhance the role of other triggers, such as choice. Once again, although this study is important to the current work in its interpretation of the role of novelty as a trigger and the influence of the presentation of the intervention, it must be referenced with caution as the researchers were not evaluating novelty. The researchers’ interpretation of their findings stems from their understanding of the work of Cordova and Lepper (1996) which is evaluated below. This interpretation resonates with the notion of the novelty effect, for which findings have been inconclusive in educational research. Furthermore, any parallels must be drawn with caution due to the difference in age of the participants compared to the current studies and the potential sensitivity of variables to this factor.

How novelty is interpreted as a variable is also the subject of disagreement. As part of a study assessing adults’ metacognitive awareness, Schraw and Dennison (1994) examined the effects of assigning a perspective to participants (college students) prior to their reading a story in an attempt to create differing levels of interest in order to

assess how purpose-driven interest impacts attention for a task. The authors suggest that by assigning a perspective the interestingness of the text was positively impacted. However, Renninger and Hidi (2016) argue that the findings are actually the result of the novelty of the presentation of the activity: taking a perspective when reading the text was a novel experience which triggered and maintained situational interest during the task, leading to higher levels of engagement and focus in completing the task. As well as illustrating some of the ambiguity of how novelty is identified and investigated, this example also highlights the challenges in and importance of explicitly isolating variables for clarification of which variables may be triggering situational interest.

There is only limited research that directly investigates the effects of novelty as a trigger for situational interest. Furthermore, interpreting what is meant by novelty as a concept further complicates this: it is important that if novelty as a variable is to be understood effectively in research, then there is a need to establish a clear interpretation of what constitutes novelty. The CORI studies (Guthrie, Wigfield and colleagues) assert the notion of novelty but again, any effects are assessed as part of the intervention put in place rather than discretely. It is therefore proposed that the evidence so far examined to determine the effects of novelty as a discrete variable provide neither clear definition nor strong support.