Individual, situational and topic interest in geoscience among 11‐ and 12‐year‐old children

All interest necessarily links the person with the external environment: the object/s of interest. Research into children’s interests is examined in the context of a rapidly‐expanding literature which has generated several powerful concepts in recent decades, notably ‘individual interest’, ‘situational interest’ and ‘topic interest’. The first is relatively robust and is usually represented as a manifestation of personality traits and psychological states. ‘Situational interest’, in contrast, relates to the learning environment, the context, and is essentially transitory. ‘Topic interest’ is more complex and a consensual definition has yet to emerge. It is conceived either as a subset of ‘individual interest’, involving a restricted part of a knowledge domain (the colloquial meaning of topic), or as a fluid amalgam of individual and situational interest. Very little research has been undertaken on science topic interest, the majority of related work dealing either with children’s interests in science per se or with the efficacy of selected teaching approaches. Geoscience rarely figures within that body of science education literature, typically but only occasionally being included in lists of science topics offered to subjects for response. A sample of 652 11‐ and 12‐year‐old children was surveyed in 27 classrooms across 11 UK schools in order to identify existing geoscience interest. Results indicate that children have high interest in major geo‐events set in the geological past, present and future and in current environmental changes which have direct implications for the future of humanity. They also have coherent topic interest in gradual (i.e., uniformitarian) change in the geological past. Girls have a preference for phenomena perceived as aesthetically pleasing and boys have a preference for the extreme and catastrophic. Children from middle (8‐ to 12‐years) schools have less interest in geoscience generally than do children of the same age in secondary (11‐ to 18‐years) schools.