Cultivating Situational Interest in Blended Learning Environment.

According to the theories of interest and self-determination in education psychology, students' academic performance will be positively affected by situational interest and learning motivation. For improving the design of an engineering course at the City University of Hong Kong in a blended learning environment, we apply these two theories to form a new conceptual model and verify it through an experimental study in which a total number of 61 undergraduate students participated during a whole 13-week course. In this study, we aim at finding out how situational interest can be cultivated. The data analysis results show that the learning motivation can further cultivate the situational interest on top of the individual interest, and the perceived usefulness of instructional design can enhance students' learning satisfaction and learning motivation. Our findings make theoretical contributions by combining these two theories and demonstrate the importance of these theories on the instructional design.