Driven by Topics: High School Students' Interest in Evolutionary Biology

摘要

We investigated potential drivers of interest in topic-context and topic-activity combinations, as well as interactions between the different elements of situational interest in evolutionary biology. High school students (n = 982, age 17 years) were asked to rate their interest in two sets of items consisting of topic-context and topic-activity combinations. Rasch modeling, analyses of variance, and descriptive statistics revealed that topics are the dominant dimension and moderate the general level of interest that students express in both topic-context and topic-activity combinations. Qualitative findings from interviews with high school students (n = 6, age 16 years) support this finding. Thus, choice of a particular context, as well as choice of a particular activity, may be less important than previously assumed, since topics are the bottleneck and drive situational interest in topic-context combinations and topic-activity combinations. Implications for evolution education are discussed.