Assessing the Impact of Topic Interest on
Comprehension Processes (RR 11-02)
by Joseph P. Magliano, Amanda M. Durik, and Janet K. Holt,
Northern Illinois University
Executive Summary
Cognitive ability and prior knowledge have been traditionally explored in terms of
their influence on measures of academic performance. Many other variables, however,
may influence these measures. Performance may be affected not only by knowledge
and cognitive skills, but also by the extent to which students are motivated and engaged
in an academic task. Motivational variables may even explain within-person variability
across tasks that measure similar constructs. Understanding how these factors affect
this variability is critical not only for basic research on cognitive processes, but also for
educational practices and assessment.
The present study focuses on the motivational variable of interest, and how interest
relates to processes involved in reading. Interest describes a particular relationship
between a person and a content area that is characterized by focused attention and
positive affect. This research was designed to examine how interest changes the
processes related to comprehension while reading expository texts. Although evidence
of the relationship between interest and reading comprehension has been accumulating
in the literature, this relationship is not well understood. Studies have shown that
interest and performance are related under some circumstances but not others.
Moreover, there has been an emphasis in prior research on whether interest affects
comprehension outcomes (e.g., performance on a standardized test), rather than how
and why it affects the processes that occur during reading to support comprehension
and under what conditions the interest–performance relationship emerges.
The purpose of the present study was to assess the extent to which interest affects
processes that occur during reading and processes that support comprehension. We
believe that focusing on this relationship can provide important insights into how and
why interest can affect performance on outcome measures of comprehension.
Furthermore, based on the assumption that other individual-difference factors (e.g.,
reading skill, prior topic-relevant knowledge) would be implicated in the interest–performance relationship, these individual-difference measures were also included in
the current model. Finally, the relationships between interest and task performance may
be reciprocal across time as readers interact with text. Therefore, interest both before
and after reading was measured in order to explore the extent to which comprehension
processes are an outcome as well as a predictor of interest. This allowed us to
ascertain whether prereading interest corresponded to cognitive processes online, and
whether cognitive processes online corresponded to changes in postreading interest.
The results indicated that higher-interest readers process texts more slowly, and
demonstrate greater sensitivity to features that support the construction of a coherent
mental model for a text, than lower-interest readers. Moreover, there is some evidence
that interest helps less-skilled readers become more engaged with the text. These
results provide some explanations for a growing body of literature that shows that texttopic
interest affects performance on comprehension tests. Moreover, they suggest that
topic interest could be used as a scaffold to promote comprehension.