EXAMINING THE MEDIATING EFFECT OF LEARNING STRATEGIES ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STUDENTS’ HISTORY INTERESTS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

Research into the effect of interest on students’ academic performance consistently indicates that interest plays an important role during the learning process. However, the mechanism through which interest affects learning is not well documented. Possible explanatory variables include attention, persistence, concentration, affect, and learning strategies. This study intends to examine the mediating effect of students’ learning strategies on the relationship between their interests and cognitive learning outcomes in the history domain. The participants were 7th grade students from eastern part of China. The researcher developed History Interest Inventory to measure students’ interest in learning history, and revised Biggs’s Learning Approaches Inventory to measure learning strategies. The assessment of learning outcomes was based on Bloom’s learning outcome taxonomy. The validity of a proposed model was examined in which effects of students’ history interests on their learning were mediated by their learning strategies. It was hypothesized that students with lower history interest were more likely to adopt surface learning strategy, whereas those with higher interest intended adopt deep learning strategy, and the adoption of the learning strategies affected learning outcomes successively.
Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and the distribution of products test were used to evaluate the mediating effects of the learning strategy variables. The results indicated that students’ surface strategy played a significant role in mediating the relationship between history interest and achievement, especially on their lower level thinking. The findings enriched researchers and teachers’ understanding of the internal psychological process of interests’ influence on learning results