Situational Interest in Literary Text.

Contemp Educ Psychol

Department of Educational Psychology, The University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Published: October 1997

AI Article Synopsis

  • The study explored how different features of a literary text influence reader interest, understanding, and personal reactions.
  • It identified six key text characteristics, with suspense, coherence, and thematic complexity being crucial for generating reader interest.
  • Interestingly, while situational interest didn’t correlate with a multiple-choice test on main ideas, it was linked to personal responses and overall interpretations of the text.

Article Abstract

This study examined relationships among text characteristics, situational interest, two measures of text understanding, and personal responses when reading a literary text. A factor analysis of ratings made after reading revealed six interrelated text characteristics. Of these, suspense, coherence and thematic complexity explained 54% of the variance in interest. Additional analyses found that situational interest was unrelated to a multiple choice test of main ideas; but was related to personal responses and holistic interpretations of the text. These results suggest that multiple aspects of literary texts are interesting to readers, and that interest is related to personal engagement variables, even when it is not related to the comprehension of main ideas. Copyright 1997Academic Press

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1997.0944DOI Listing

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