The influence of interest and working memory on learning

Text factors and working memory capacity were studied in terms of how they contribute to perceiving a narrative text as interesting and how these factors, separately and combined, facilitate inference-making and learning from narrative texts by using a series of mixed factors, repeated measure ANOVAs. The text-based factors manipulated in this study were absolute interest by including or not including a concept of violence, romance, or death and unexpectedness in terms of causal constraint by making the outcome of the text explicit, highly likely, or providing an alternate outcome. The average interest rating of the texts was higher if the text included a concept of absolute interest but was not influenced by level of causal constraint. The percent of correct inference generation was higher for texts that were explicit or high constraint compared to low constraint. The average number of correct responses to open ended questions and the proportion of the text recalled was higher for texts that included a concept of interest. There was also a significant interaction such that recall was particularly higher for texts that included a concept of interest and had a low level of constraint. Working memory capacity did not have an effect on interest ratings or learning outcomes. The results of this study indicate that readers are more likely to perceive a text as interesting, to be able to answer open ended questions about the text, and recall the text if the text includes a concept of absolute interest. Theoretical implications, future directions, and educational applications of the findings are discussed.