Motivational Factors and Writing: the Role of Topic Interestingness

The primary objective was to investigate the effect of an important motivational variable — interest — on sixth-grade children's performance on a writing task. Because our previous research showed that prior knowledge has an inordinate effect on writing, we augmented the children's knowledge of the topics they were to write about. Students studied one of four texts (two high-interest/moderate-knowledge and two low-interest/high-knowledge) and then were assigned to either a tutorial condition, in which they studied and wrote about the same topic, or a control condition, in which they studied one topic and wrote about a companion topic at the same interest and knowledge level. Our general expectation, that children writing with tutorial support on high-interest topics would do better than all other groups because of the motivational effect, was not supported. The results unexpectedly showed that low-interest topics supported by tutorials resulted in longer productions. In addition, high interest topics facilitated only better quality ideas, but not qualitatively better writing. These results indicate that the motivational power of generally interesting topics in writing is confounded with the role of prior knowledge. It is further suggested that attentional factors may explain why topic interest has a limited effect on children's writing performance.