Exploring interest in education: Understanding the core of Dr. Suzanne Hidi’s psychological research

In this 3-part series, OISE outlines the groundbreaking research of adjunct faculty Dr. Suzanne Hidi.

Dr. Hidi, a leader in educational psychology at OISE’s Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development, has delved deeply into understanding interest, a concept widely researched in the field of educational psychology.

This first installment defines “interest” in developmental psychology and explores how Dr. Hidi came to begin asking academic questions about the concept. The subsequent stories on research applications and research recognition are also available.

Dr. Suzanne Hidi began exploring the concept of interest as an immigrant struggling to adapt to Canadian academic life as a University of Toronto undergrad and a refugee from Hungary.

“I was taking economics and philosophy,” recalled Hidi about her undergraduate life. “And my own experience relating to these two subject matters was that I was interested in and loved philosophy, and was totally bored and uninterested in economics.”

As a doctoral student at OISE working as a research officer, she authored a pivotal and oft-cited paper on summarization and it made her think back to her divergent interests. “It was in my mind that when you read something that's interesting, there's something else going on. You're psychologically and physiologically in a different state than if you are processing information that is not interesting.”

What is interest?

According to Hidi's pioneering 1990 paper, interest is explained as a “mental resource” — a means of processing information that leads to attention, learning and better performance for a student.

Many define interest differently. Hidi says that interest is also a motivational variable – the more interested, the more motivated you are. “Furthermore, it’s also a psychological state,” she says, “you feel different, you know when you’re interested – you don't have to ask yourself ‘Am I interested,’ you just know when you are interested.

Originally, Hidi had little clue that this is related to any kind of brain activity. However, her 1990 paper made strides – making connections between rising interest in something and what is happening in the brain. In that paper, she suggested a new word to describe this processing.

“I didn't use the word ‘neuroscientific’ – I referred to it as physiological research,” she recalls. “Today we call this neuroscientific research, which explains how the psychological and physiological state during activities of interest can help you process information, so you can remember it, learn it, stay with it.”

The four-phase model of interest

When Hidi met her long-time collaborator Professor K. Ann Renninger – who is based at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania – she focused particularly on small children aged two to five years old and Hidi found that children exhibited what they now refer to as individual interest. “That interest drove what they looked at in kindergarten, and what they played with and how they remembered,” said Hidi.

Eventually, Renninger and Hidi began working together more robustly. That partnership, ongoing for over 30 years, has resulted in a book published in 2016 and also numerous articles and collaborations.

Their early collaboration produced a landmark 2006 paper expanding on Hidi’s concept of interest – a paper successfully cited by researchers thousands of times. The paper which outlined a model describing four phases in the development and deepening of learner interest: triggered situational interest, maintained situational interest, emerging (less-developed) individual interest, and well-developed individual interest.

With this model, Hidi and Renninger observed that knowledge and value develop with interest over time. “At the very beginning, you might not value the object of your interest , nor have knowledge about it. But as you develop the interest, you become more knowledgeable about the subject or about whatever the activity involves, and you value it more and more,” she says.

“So, for example, you might give up going to the movies if you can play chess, if that's your object of interest.”

That paper, Hidi says, helped focus their research on development – how you develop, for example, interest in academically uninterested children. Hidi and Renninger published several subsequent papers emphasizing the idea that interest develops through experiencing external triggers – the triggering of situational interest.

The trajectory for interest varies by the individual, says Hidi. “You might maintain a triggered interest for a time – like children’s interest in dinosaurs. Then one day, that interest may be  replaced by something like starting to play chess.”

Interests are not necessarily lifelong, she argues. They can stagnate or disappear.  However, they can be fostered within a student’s education.

“There are ways to present material in class, some which appear in some of our papers, and what role parents can help [in a student’s education], so parents can trigger and help maintain interest. And so can teachers.”