Studying Student Interests
Studying Student Interests
Why use interests as a basis
- Education is an active process needing the learner’s active effort.
- Learners learn mainly the things that interest them.
- Offering matters of interest secures participation and effective learning.
Why interests are not enough alone
- The purpose of education is to broaden and deepen interests.
- Begin with present interest as a point of departure.
- Desirable interests are a starting point; narrow or inadequate interests reveal gaps.
Recommendation
- Plan a series of studies, one aspect of interest at a time, not one giant study.
Progressive education makes a strong claim: identify learners’ interests, and let those interests become the basis for educational objectives. There is real wisdom in this, and also a trap. Interests are a powerful starting point but a poor finishing line.
Why interests matter
Several reasons support starting from interest. Education is an active process that involves the active effort of learners; nothing is learned by a passive mind. Learners learn mainly the things that interest them, so interest is the engine of real learning. A school that offers matters of genuine interest to its learners secures their participation, and through that participation they learn to deal with those situations effectively. Learning to handle present situations well, in turn, builds their ability to deal with new situations as they arise in the future.
So the role of education is partly to provide opportunities for learners to enter actively into activities that interest them or deeply involve them, and to enable them to carry on such activities effectively later. Interest gets the learner moving.
Education is active, and learners learn mainly what interests them
Offering matters of interest secures participation, and through it learners handle present situations effectively, which builds their ability to deal with new situations in future.
Why interests are not enough on their own
Interests are where you start, not where you stop. The purpose of education is to broaden and deepen learner interests, and to help learners keep educating themselves after formal schooling ends. If a curriculum only ever gave learners what they were already interested in, it would leave their interests as narrow as it found them.
So educators value beginning with a learner’s present interest as a point of departure, then moving beyond it. To set objectives, a developer investigates learners’ present interests and reads them in two ways:
- If the identified interests are desirable ones, they provide the starting point for instruction.
- If the interests are undesirable, narrow, limited, or inadequate, they indicate gaps, and effective education requires those gaps to be filled.
The same investigation that finds a healthy interest to build on also finds a missing interest to develop. This is how studies of children’s interests have led to real curricula: questions about science shaped an elementary science curriculum, reading interests shaped a literature curriculum, and interest in sports and games shaped a physical education curriculum.
Education exists to broaden and deepen interests, not just satisfy them
Present interest is a point of departure. Desirable interests give a starting point for instruction; narrow or inadequate ones reveal gaps that effective education should fill.
How to study interests
Interests should be studied carefully, not all at once. A series of investigations into various aspects of learner interest should be planned, rather than a single study trying to cover everything. Learners have interests of many kinds, so it works better to study one aspect at a time, such as interest in health, in language, in the environment, or in family life, each in its own investigation.
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