Received: 12 September 2017 Revised: 6 September 2017 Accepted: 8 September 2017

DOI: 10.1002/sce.21319

ISSUES AND TRENDS

An inquiry into the structure of situational

interests
Flávio S. Azevedo

Department of Curriculum and Instruction, The

University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712,
USA
Correspondence
Flávio S. Azevedo, Department of Curriculum and
Instruction, The University of Texas at Austin,
Austin, TX 78712, USA
Email: flavio@austin.utexas.edu580
Abstract
I advance theoretically and empirically grounded arguments for
broadening how we frame and understand situational interests. A
situational interest refers to the short-term spike in a person's atten-
tion and participation in an activity and it is triggered in the inter-
actions between the person and environment features (e.g., novelty
and surprise). As represented in the literature, extant conceptions
of the phenomenon frame it fundamentally as a discontinuity in a
person's experiences. Put differently, a situational interest denotes
a moment in which a new object or activity is first brought into a per-
son's stream of experiences and its triggering marks the boundary
between two qualitatively distinct moments—a before-and-after—in
one's ongoing activity participation. In contrast, I conjecture that sit-
uational interests are best understood as phenomena that combine
both discontinuous and continuous dimensions of experience. To
argue this point, I use three in-depth videotaped case studies of the
triggering and (when available) retriggering of situational interests
in STEM-based practices and show that the continuity + discontinu-
ity lens provides a fine-grained and more accountable description of
the phenomenon, its triggering process, and its eventual uptake and
development (or not).

KEYWORDS
activity, continuities and discontinuities, individual interest, situa-
tional interest, socio-cultural theory

1 AN INQUIRY INTO THE STRUCTURE OF SITUATIONAL INTERESTS

This paper advances theorizing on the nature and functioning of situational interests (Dohn, 2010; Palmer, 2009;
Renninger & Bachrach, 2015; Schraw, Flowerday, & Lehman, 2001, Silvia, 2006). While recent work has added much
to our understanding of these issues (e.g., Renninger, Nieswandt, & Hidi, 2015; Renninger & Hidi, 2016; Walker,
Pressick-Kilborn, Arnold, & Sainsbury, 2004), I argue that attending to the broader structure of human activity and
how a situational interest unfolds in action—that is, its moment-by-moment occurrence within socially and culturally

Science Education. 2018;102:108–127. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/sce 

c 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 108
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organized activities—can lead to a more comprehensive and coherent account of the phenomenon. My goal here is to
start developing these claims through theoretically and empirically grounded arguments.
A situational interest refers to a short-term spike in a person's attention and participation in an activity and it is
triggered by features of the environment (Bergin, 2016; Hidi, Renninger, & Krapp, 2004; Krapp, Hidi, & Renninger,
1992; Renninger & Hidi, 2016; Schiefele, 2009; Schraw & Lehman, 2001). For example, in the context of college
mathematics activities, Durik, Hulleman, and Harackiewicz (2015) found that students had triggered situational inter-
ests in response to elements of novelty, complexity, and uncertainty designed into instructional materials. Similarly,
in several inquiry-based lessons focusing on various topics in the physical sciences, Palmer (2009) found that stu-
dents’ situational interests were triggered due to factors such as opportunities to learn (say, a new topic or investi-
gation technique), choice (e.g., deciding where to steer investigations), novelty, and physical activity (i.e., actively doing
something).
Outside formal classroom arrangements, research has found similar results. For instance, 17- to 19-year-old stu-
dents visiting an aquarium had triggered interests due to novelty, surprise (as in uncertainty, above), unusualness of
a situation, and hands-on aspects of the activity (e.g., handling fish and crabs), and their participation changed as they
were differentially exposed to these elements (Dohn, 2010). Likewise, participants in a biology workshop had triggered
situational interests in response to such factors as social interactions, autonomy (as in choice, above), hands-on work
(as in actively manipulating something, above), and the use of computer technology, as well as a combination of multiple
such factors (Renninger & Bachrach, 2015).
As we inspect these examples and many others in the literature (e.g., Ainley, Hidi, & Berndorff, 2002; Boekaerts &
Boscollo, 2002; Hoffman, 2002; Schraw & Lehman, 2001), we note that extant notions or conceptions of situational
interests frame the phenomenon fundamentally as a discontinuity in a person's experiences. Put differently, a situa-
tional interest captures or denotes a moment in which a new object (broadly conceived) or activity is first brought into
a person's stream of experiences. Renninger and Bachrach (2015) hint at that “Experiences that trigger interest are
often—by definition—unexpected and ephemeral, and participants may not be reflectively aware that their interest
has been triggered” (p. 59). Indeed, the language of triggering itself highlights a qualitatively distinct before-and-after
in the flow of a person's activity. That is, triggering marks the boundary—some kind of discontinuity—between two
different moments in one's ongoing activity participation.
While I believe such discontinuities in experience and quality of participation do exist, I argue that focusing on them
blinds us to the larger continuities within which the whole of one's experience takes on meaning. In fact, understand-
ing activity continuities is essential to grasping how new experiences—such as emergent, situational interests—are
appropriated into one's existing repertoire of activities and practices. In this paper, therefore, I advance the conjec-
ture that situational interests are best understood as phenomena that combine both continuous and discontinuous
dimensions of experience. Theoretically, a focus on activity continuities harkens back to Vygotsky's (1962, 1978) for-
mulation of human developmental processes and its various extensions in activity theory (Engeström, 1987; Greeno
& Engeström, 2014; Leont'ev, 1981) and cultural psychology (Cole, 1998; Rogoff, 1997; Saxe, 1996), all of which see
humans as constantly participating in several concurrent activities (or whole activity systems). Furthermore, these
activities bear complex relationships to one another. Seen in this light, ignoring the co-constitutive role of activity
continuities and discontinuities misses some of the basic structural makeup of situational interests. As a corollary, we
will see that framing situational interests as simultaneously continuous and discontinuous experiences provides us a
more accountable description of the phenomenon, its triggering process, and its eventual uptake and development
(or not).
In what follows, I elaborate and illustrate these points through case studies of people's interest-based par-
ticipation in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) practices. All cases illustrate the con-
tinuity + discontinuity lens that I propose, and each further brings into relief slightly distinct aspects of the
phenomenology of situational interests. Throughout, the focus is on processes and real-time activity of individ-
uals so as to track the sequential, moment-to-moment, in situ manifestation of a situational interest from an
emic perspective. I close by taking stock of the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological implications of my
arguments.
110 AZEVEDO

2 BACKGROUND

To further motivate and contextualize my inquiry, it helps to consider the larger conceptual terrain within which
this work resides. As we have seen, a situational interest “describes a short term psychological state that involves
focused attention, increased cognitive functioning, persistence, enjoyment or affective involvement, and curios-
ity” (Schiefele, 2009, p. 198). At the other end of the spectrum, an individual (personal) interest refers to a long-
term disposition to engage with a particular practice or set of activities (Azevedo, 2011, 2013; Hidi, 2006; Krapp,
2003; Renninger, 1992; Renninger & Hidi, 2016). For example, a model rocketeer who has practiced the hobby
for several years is said to have an individual interest in the practice, the routines that rocketeer communities
enact, the material objects (e.g., rockets, motors, parachutes, and tools) that populate the hobby, the social rela-
tionships fostered by club practice, and so on. As such, the hobbyist voluntarily chooses to participate in the prac-
tice and dedicates significant time to it (relative to other practices), learning much throughout (Azevedo, 2011,
2017).
Relatively speaking, a lot has been written about situational interests and individual interests, but lit-
tle about what happens “in between”—that is, how an interest grows over time and the life span, from its
emergent, tentative initial manifestations to more stable and sustained forms of engagement. Most notably,
a model has been proposed that describes interest development as lying along four distinct phases (Hidi &
Renninger, 2006; Renninger & Hidi, 2016). The first phase, which is termed "triggered situational interest,"
describes the moment in which an interest is first sparked, as discussed above. To that follow phases of
"maintained situational interest," "emerging individual interest," and finally a "well-developed individual inter-
est." The model attempts to capture key characteristics of interest development by calling attention to such
parameters as the person's growing knowledge about, positive affect, and valuing of the topic/domain of
interest.
Absent from these treatments are detailed accounts of the dynamics of interest enactment and pursuit, across
timescales of participation, as well as processes undergirding interest development. Tackling these issues, Barron
(2006, 2010) observed that youth participating in technology-centered, interest-based pursuits actively created
opportunities for their own learning and growth and they did so within networks of people, practices, technologies,
and values in a given local environment. These arrangements constitute learning ecologies (Barron, 2006), and they
are usually associated with the different settings (e.g., the home, school, and after-school program) across which a
person enacts the practice of interest. As Barron (2006, 2010) noted, youth's technology-linked interests developed
as they moved through distinct learning ecologies, appropriated setting-specific resources, and forged connections
among those.
In the science classroom, Engle and Conant (2002) closely attended to interactions among participants in a fifth-
grade biology unit and followed several episodes in which a group of students became engaged in heated and substan-
tive scientific arguments. While the unit centered on investigating environmental pressures on different species (orcas,
in the focal group's case), the group had become interested on whether orcas were whales or dolphins—a question
regarding species classification, and thus not immediately relevant to the unit. As the authors demonstrated, however,
the group's periodically returning to that parallel topic of interest functioned as an engine for their continued investi-
gation and learning. In turn, that dynamics of participation rested on the teacher's devolving authority to students and
allowing them to problematize the very content and goals of the lesson.
Finally, focusing on a different aspect of the dynamics of interest-based participation, some have highlighted the
fluctuating patterns of practice engagement that obtain over time, even when a person is highly involved with such a
practice. For instance, Joseph and Edelson (2002) noted the wavering in intensity and goals of youth's self-initiated,
long-term pursuits in a video-making workshop, which sometimes led them to struggle with project completion and
the like. Others have proposed that such dynamics are natural and follow from the context-dependent character of
interests, short- or long-term (Paris & Turner, 1994). I will return to these points throughout the article and particularly
in the Discussion section.
AZEVEDO 111

3 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

To develop my arguments conceptually and to build a basis for my analytical approach (described later), first I elaborate
a theoretical framework that can capture continuities and discontinuities in a person's ongoing activity participation.
As previously stated, I begin with a broad activity theoretical and interactionist perspective (Greeno & Engeström,
2014; Jordan & Henderson, 1995; Stevens & Hall, 1998; Vygotsky, 1978) and argue that, at any point in time and social
situation, one (e.g., a student in science class or a visitor to a museum) participates in a variety of simultaneous activities
that extend deep into one's life and/or more local and contextual arrangements (Cole, 1998; Rogoff, 1995, 1997).
To exemplify, consider a student working on an open-ended, long-term project-based unit (PBL) in a science or math-
ematics classroom (e.g., Barron et al., 1998). During group work, and indeed at any other point in the lesson, any single
student will be engaged in several concurrent activities, such as (1) attempting to learn the substantive material of the
unit; (2) seeking to finish the project in a timely manner (which may not fully align with learning the material); (3) guar-
anteeing a good grade (which again may not necessarily align with the prior two items); (4) actively working to develop
an identity of competence and creativity; (5) managing long-term social relationships, some locally meaningful and oth-
ers more deeply held; and others (see Engle & Conant, 2002 for a detailed example; see also Barron, 2010 and Stevens,
2010). Likewise, as we will see, an amateur astronomer taking part in collective observational practice always engaged
in several simultaneous activities, such as observing preferred celestial objects, opportunistically observing through
peers’ telescopes during collective practice, completing observational milestones that qualified for awards, engaging
in long-term social interactions, teaching visitors about astronomy, among others (Azevedo, 2013).
Now, in action, new activities are constantly fashioned in the interactions among participants in a setting (Goodwin,
2000, 2011; Jordan & Henderson, 1995; Leont'ev, 1981; Stevens & Hall, 1998; Stevens, 2010). Such activities respond
to the demands of the immediate task and practice environment, but also to the competing demands of individuals’
various simultaneous activities (Goodwin, 2011). It is during these transactions among participants that some activ-
ities may emerge as situational interests for particular individuals (Azevedo, 2006; Barron, 2006, 2010; Eisenhart &
Edwards, 2004; Engle & Conant, 2002). In the example of our PBL students (above), for instance, this may be occasioned
by a serendipitous group discovery, the opening of opportunities to express oneself and to engage parallel interests, the
dynamics of interaction between group members, among others.
At the same time, this novel form of activity in a person's practice emerges enmeshed within his/her multiple ongo-
ing pursuits. In other words, whatever it is that is “interesting” (in the sense of novel and engaging) in an emergent form
of activity, such an activity arises in the context of, and in direct relationship to all other activities in which one con-
currently participates. From this perspective, therefore, a situational interest is made up of multiple and interacting
activity dimensions—material, social, cultural, psychological, physical, and others—some of which are continuous and
others discontinuous with prior forms of activities in one's life. Activity continuities and discontinuities exist in unity
and cannot be comprehended separate from one another (e.g., Saxe, 1996).
Moreover, while any novel activity in one's repertoire is constituted in the moment (Jordan & Henderson, 1995;
Stevens, 2010), it has a prior history that is crucial to accounting for how it is produced at any particular point in time
(Greeno & Engeström, 2014; Rogoff, 1995; Scribner, 1985; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1981). Indeed, continuities are
seen in the person's historical patterns of practice participation, within and beyond the immediate context of action.
I look into this history to trace, on a moment-by-moment fashion, all discontinuities and continuities across various
dimensions of a person's practice participation, and seek to find how those interact in events of triggering and (when
empirically available) retriggering of situational interests.
To help visualize and further elaborate these ideas, I borrow the metaphor of fabric of activities (diSessa, 2000). A
person's fabric of activities represents the full set of activities in his/her life and each individual thread stands for a
single, specific activity within the person's larger repertoire. In this scheme, then, a situational interest can be modeled
as the weaving of a new thread into the existing fabric. To understand how a new thread—in our case, one sparked by a
situational interest1 —is added to and/or accommodated by this fabric is to understand both the thread and the fabric.
Furthermore, from this perspective, activity continuities can be seen in the hooks and knots that the emergent activ-
ity creates with the fabric or in its contact with parallel and adjacent threads. Likewise, discontinuities are captured by
112 AZEVEDO

the unwoven, “hanging” segments of the new thread. New threads carry both continuities and discontinuities, and so
discontinuities become fully meaningful to one's practice as he/she further and progressively weave that thread into
his/her fabric of activities. This provides a basis for modeling and explaining how activity discontinuities may eventually
become an integral part of one's life repertoire.
Within this fabric metaphor, we can make a number of pointed theoretical observations and predictions regarding
the functioning and structure of situational interests. Two are immediately relevant to my purposes. First, note that
in any given fabric all threads are somehow connected, even if indirectly. Any single thread may stretch far into one's
larger fabric (i.e., various realms of a person's life) and therefore connect seemingly unrelated aspects/dimensions of
one's life. As such, we may expect that a situational interest be sparked by, or have a straight connection to, apparently
irrelevant or “distant” activities in one's life space. By attending to how subtle aspects of people's lives make it into the
local context of an emergent situational interests, we find how new activities bear deep continuities to diverse parts of
one's life space. As well, this captures and anticipates the idiosyncratic character of interests, from inception to long-
term development (Azevedo, 2011; Barron, 2010; Durik et al., 2015; Renninger & Hidi, 2016).
Second, a fabric will be densely woven in and around a person's individual interests. As we have considered, an
individual interest is a well-developed and stable set of pursuits in a person's life—that is, long-standing and richly
elaborated forms of activities in one's larger repertoire (Azevedo, 2011, 2013; Barron, 2006; Hidi & Renninger, 2006;
Renninger & Hidi, 2016). Studying how situational interests arise within thickly and tightly woven areas of one's fabric
of activities will afford us a fine-grained level of detail in capturing both discontinuities and continuities in triggering
and retriggering events.

4 METHODOLOGY AND EMPIRICAL CONTEXTS

The methodology and methods I use here are somewhat unconventional in that I did not set out to empirically verify
an a priori research question. Instead, I start from existing and heavily analyzed data sets that can be mined for rich
and detailed illustrations of interest-based phenomena, both short and long term. In part, the analysis here gains
its strength from the extensive nature of those data and the cumulative and heterogeneous analyses to which they
have been submitted across the years (see Azevedo, 2000, 2006, 2015; diSessa, 2000, 2002; diSessa & Sherin, 2000;
Friedman & diSessa, 1999; Sherin, 2000).
I draw on two distinct sets of data, collected as part of two distinct research projects. Despite the difference in core
aims, the projects were united by the goal of documenting and explaining short- and long-term processes of partici-
pation and learning in STEM-based practices. Methodologically, in both projects data were collected in ethnographic
fashion (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995) and videotapes were the main medium of data recording, complemented by
field notes.
The first data set was produced in the context of an after-school program named The Symbols of Science. Briefly, the
basic aim of that course was to introduce students to complex topics in STEM disciplines, through the design and use of
visual representations (diSessa, 2000). STEM disciplines are foundationally grounded on myriad technical representa-
tions (e.g., diagrams, Cartesian graphs, pictures, tables, drawings, among many others), which professionals constantly
adapt or create from scratch (Latour, 1987; Pickering, 1995). By providing students access to such practices, therefore,
we sought to expose them to core aspects of professional scientific work and material culture while also drawing on
their competence with design-based activities (diSessa, 2000; Friedman & diSessa, 1999; Greeno & Hall, 1997; Resnick,
1996).
The second data set was gathered as part of a long-term effort to investigate the nature of individual interests. To
observe a “pure” interest, I chose as empirical grounds the hobby of amateur astronomy (Azevedo, 2013). The idea is
that hobbies are self-motivated, self-guided, long-term, and sometimes lifelong practices (i.e., prototypically interest-
driven pursuits) and studying the patterns of participation that hobbyists develop over time can shed light on the basic
structure and processes underlying individual interests (Azevedo, 2011, 2017; Krapp, Hidi, & Renninger, 1992).
AZEVEDO 113

On this background, two points are of general methodological importance. First, in line with the goal of analyzing
the fine-grained structure of situational interests, I select in-depth empirical cases (Becker, 2014; Harper, 1992) of the
emergence and reemergence of situational interests across both studies. Comparing and contrasting the similarities
and differences across such cases lends some degree of generality to my findings (Becker, 2014) and allows me to hone
into the structural details of activity continuities and discontinuities during episodes of situational interests.
Second and directly related to the first, the selected cases represent different contexts and manifestations of situa-
tional interests (Azevedo, 2015), so that contrasting them makes some dimensions of interest phenomena more promi-
nently visible. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is the comparison across settings in which situational interests
are manifested (i.e., the classroom environment of an after-school program and the fields of a hobby practice) and the
somewhat contrasting phenomenology of situational interest as manifested at different phases of interest develop-
ment (i.e., within a long-term and well-developed interest and a canonical, short-lived situational interest).
In the remainder of this section, I provide a synthetic account of the empirical context of each research project,
present some baseline data on both projects, and consider issues in the selection of analytical cases of triggered situ-
ational interests in each of those contexts. Additional data will be shown in the Analysis section. Readers are referred
to 2013, 2013), Azevedo (2006, Azevedo, diSessa, and Sherin (2012), and Azevedo, Martalock, and Keser (2015) for
extensive data and complementary analyses on the cases considered below.

4.1 An after-school program

Our after-school program enrolled students from Grades 7–11 and served a total of 19 students over two consecutive
summers. The course ran for 6 weeks and met twice a week for 3 hours, roughly divided into three 50-minutes-long
segments with 15-minute breaks in between. In total, we collected about 30 hours of videotapes and research assis-
tants took extensive field notes on classroom events.
Any single day included in-class and computer lab work. In class, students explored a wide variety of activities cen-
tered on designing, interpreting, and improving upon pictorial representations of physical phenomena (for details, see
Azevedo, 2000; diSessa, 2000, 2002; diSessa & Sherin, 2000; Friedman & diSessa, 1999; Sherin, 2000). For example, in
one instance students were given paper, pencil, and crayons and asked to represent pictorially the motion of different
objects—e.g., a falling ball of clay or a car moving at varying speed and direction along a road. Similarly, students were
shown various model (scaled down) terrain and asked to represent terrain features such that different constituencies
(say, a hypothetical hiker) could read and understand the representation. In both cases, the activities included sev-
eral cycles of design in which students progressively refined their representations. Throughout, they argued about the
trade-offs in their representational choices and various properties of their designs, and eventually converged on cre-
ating more canonical representations of science—Cartesian graphs and topographical maps, respectively.
In the computer lab, students engaged in scientific image processing activities to investigate images of galaxies, the
moon, and their own photographed faces (diSessa & Sherin, 2000; Friedman & diSessa, 1999). Briefly, scientific image
processing is a representational technology par excellence in that it presents an image/picture as surrogate for data.
Figure 1 shows a snapshot of the image-processing environment, in the context of the Hubble activity (more later). In
the figure, the Hubble image is a rendering of numerical values underlying each pixel in the image. The exact appearance
(i.e., color) of any given pixel in the display is mapped through a user-defined color palette (see Palette Warehouse,
Figure 1). The display is thus a representation whose parameters can be examined or adjusted through various tools,
including zooming in/out of the image, inspecting individual pixel data values, and setting min/max data value ranges for
image rendering (Figure 1). Image manipulation and analysis tools not shown in this picture included a Color and Palette
Making Tools, whose products could be fed into the Palette Warehouse (Figure 1, right). In all, a rich and challenging
environment for students was available to explore.

4.1.1 Selecting cases of situational interests in the after-school data

How were cases of triggered situational interests identified and selected for analysis? In the after-school program,
data were collected in full and analyzed once classes were finished. Empirical cases were thus selected retrospectively
114 AZEVEDO

F I G U R E 1 A snapshot of the image-processing software environment. From left to right, an image of several galax-
ies (taken by the Hubble telescope), slider controls for setting min–max (range) numerical values for image rendering,
zoom control, a pixel-value data inspector, a graph of light intensity across a user-defined linear segment (slice-graph)
of the image, and palettes for rendering the image (Palette Warehouse) [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlineli-
brary.com]

(Becker, 2008), as I combed through the whole data set for instances of situational interests (see Azevedo, 2006, for
details). To do so, I borrowed criteria directly from the literature, as reviewed above. A triggered situational interest
was thus primarily identified by (i) a shift in a student's (or group's) mode of participation, as seen in his/her (ii) increased
attention, focus, and engagement (Azevedo, 2006; Renninger & Bachrach, 2015; Renninger & Hidi, 2016; Schiefele,
2009). These were accompanied by (iii) students’ increased production—say, of artifacts such as representations, solu-
tions to problems, or questions for further pursuit (Azevedo, 2006; Renninger & Bachrach, 2015)—and/or (iv) increased
discursive exchanges and interactions among participants in a scene (e.g., Azevedo et al., 2015; Engle & Conant, 2002).
This analysis led me to identify three distinct cases of triggered situational interests in the data—manifested as a
novel, previously inexistent form of activity in the person's repertoire. Two researchers independently inspected the
records and, using the same criteria, concurred that those events illustrated the triggering of a situational interest. No
other cases in the data could be unambiguously characterized as such.
Of the three identified cases, two concerned the work of student dyads and one regarded a single student. All three
cases illustrate the same dynamics and phenomenology of situational interests and, crucially, all can be interpreted
through the lens of continuities/discontinuities elaborated here. For depth of treatment, I will focus on a single case,
namely that of Dean and Peter. Extensive analyses of, and empirical material on all three cases appeared in Azevedo
(2006).

4.2 The long-term practice of amateur astronomy

The second data set from which I draw is made up of ethnographic records of amateur astronomers’ collective and
individual activities across a 2+ year period between 2001 and 2003. In total, I gathered about 9 hours of video data
and 2 hours of audiotaped-interviews, countless hours of field practice observation, some 20 pages of field notes, and
nearly 100 pages of typed and handwritten annotations and reflections on these data (e.g., analytical and theoretical
memos).
Different from the after-school program context, here the empirical cases of interest-based participation were
chosen prior to data collection (Creswell, 2013). Specifically, because the purpose of the research was to map out
the structure and processes undergirding long-term interest-driven practice, data collection was targeted at amateur
astronomers who had been pursuing the hobby for an extended period and who continued to do so throughout the
ethnographic period—that is, exemplar cases (Becker, 2014) of individual interests. (A complementary strategy was to
study those who gave up the hobby, but practicalities made that an impossible empirical goal; see Becker, 2001.)
In addition, the study was designed as a series of comparisons across individual cases of long-term hobby partic-
ipation. That was meant to make salient both similarities and differences in the deep patterns of people's long-term
AZEVEDO 115

pursuits and (again) to lend some generality to my analysis (Becker, 2001, 2014; Platt, 1992). In the final research
design, two focal case studies (Mitchell and Sally) and several opportunistic cases (i.e., practitioners who volunteered
information throughout the research) organized data collection and analysis, and resulted in a large data corpus with
detailed documentation of amateur astronomers’ practice, especially Mitchell. For this reason, here I rely solely on
Mitchell's instantiation of the hobby (see Azevedo, 2013, for extensive analyses and dense empirical material on
Mitchell's and other astronomers’ hobby work).
Mitchell was 36 years old when we first met, and he worked full-time as a software engineer. While he had been
exposed to astronomy a few times in his childhood, he had taken up the practice intensely and routinely only a year
or so before our introductory encounter. Now a seasoned astronomer, Mitchell had developed a complex practice
that extended deep into many realms of his life. Perhaps emblematic of his engagement with the hobby, Mitchell kept
detailed notes of his celestial observations. To be sure, observational notetaking is valued and widespread in amateur
astronomy communities (Azevedo, 2013). But Mitchell went “the extra mile” when it came to detail and extent of his
annotations—some 300+ handwritten pages distributed over three notebooks, all of which he allowed me to photo-
copy. The notebooks covered the periods extending from May 31, 1996 to June 22, 1996, then continuously from July
5, 2000 to September 27, 2003. As a whole, a robust set of data that allows for detailed tracking of activity continuities
and discontinuities in Mitchell's short- and long-term patterns of hobby participation.

4.2.1 Selecting cases of situational interests in Mitchell's hobby practice

Proceeding exactly as I did in the case of the after-school program data, I scanned the full data set on Mitchell's practice
retrospectively, applying the same criteria for identifying triggered situational interests. Several events were identified
that fall into this category. Again, all such events can be consistently interpreted through a continuity/discontinuity
lens—that is, in all cases, an emergent, novel activity can be identified that exhibits both continuous and discontinu-
ous dimensions with prior activities in Mitchell's repertoire. As before, for depth of consideration I select two cases
from among the larger set. As we will explore in detail, each case illustrates a somewhat distinct phenomenology of
situational interests.

5 ANALYSIS

“Close observation invariably shows that, even in the most ordinary situations, more than a few easily measured
variables are at work and that everything in the situation has some effect on what happens next. If any one of
those things isn't there or, better put, is there in a different degree or in a different form, the result (the next events
that happen) will differ. As a corollary, everything left out of the analysis or data gathering, perhaps because you
aren't aware it's present, perhaps because it's too hard to find out about, let alone measure, is still there, at work,
having its effect.”
Howard Becker (2014, p. 2).

In line with the arguments thus far, my analysis called for inspecting the data records for moments in which an emer-
gent, new activity form was first manifested in a person's stream of experiences, in the immediate context of action (e.g.,
a classroom or field of hobby practice). That posed twin challenges: How do we identify, with some degree of certainty,
a new activity in a person's larger repertoire? And how do we know we are observing the very first manifestation of an
activity, in the form of a situational interest?
To guarantee any candidate emergent activity was indeed a situational interest from an emic perspective, I searched
back in data time to verify whether any of its dimensions were indeed discontinuous with prior activities. For example, in
the flow of classroom work and conversational exchanges, a student (or group of students) may suddenly engage a given
task intensely, in the process showing great enthusiasm, increased participation, material and conceptual production,
and learn much from the experience. Rather than assuming such an event is the unambiguous manifestation of the
emergence of a situational interest, however, I follow the video records upstream from the event, attempting to identify
116 AZEVEDO

in the person's history of participation any proto-forms of such an activity. Doing so affords us the ability to distinguish
the genesis of a situational interest, as well as episodes of retriggering and uptake over time.
As a matter of definition, however, the exercise of identifying discontinuities in one's ongoing activities necessarily
entails uncovering activity continuities operating simultaneously, and in direct relationship to those discontinuities. In
terms of our fabric metaphor, hanging or unwoven parts of a new thread can only be understood in relation to the
thread's intersecting (knitted) points within the full fabric. Pragmatically, this translated into iteratively examining data
records for long- and short-term patterns in a person's activity participation and telling apart historically stable forms
of participation (i.e., continuities) from discontinuities observable at hypothesized triggering/re-triggering events.
In what follows, I apply this analytical scheme to the aforementioned instances of situational interests. I start by con-
sidering several activities of a student dyad (Dean and Peter) that worked together throughout the after-school Sym-
bols of Science course. I then consider two cases of situational interests within a single individual's (Mitchell) extended
pursuit of amateur astronomy, illustrating again the unity of activity continuities and discontinuities in triggering and
retriggering events.

5.1 Case 1: Continuities and discontinuities in students’ activities in the after-school

program
As an overarching orientation, all activities implemented in our after-school curriculum sought to foster students’
agency in both tackling proposed problems and pursuing self-devised activities. Two specific aspects of our learning
activity designs are worth mentioning because they bear directly on the upcoming analysis. First, activities were highly
open-ended, which allowed students to explore a wide variety of ideas, methods of investigation, and solutions to pro-
posed tasks. In the lab, computer-based scientific image processing activities were implemented on a software infras-
tructure (named Boxer; diSessa, 2000) that is open and extendible, which meant that students could often initiate new
and unplanned activities that went beyond (or parallel to) the assigned tasks. Second, any single activity in the curricu-
lum extended for hours or a couple of days. This allowed students enough time to try out their own emergent interests
while also keeping pace with assigned tasks and projects (again, see Azevedo, 2000, 2006, 2015; diSessa, 2000, 2002;
diSessa & Sherin, 2000; Friedman & diSessa, 1999; Sherin, 2000 for further details).
Having established this broader context, let us now consider Dean and Peter's emergent pursuit of color and palette
creation in the context of computer-based, scientific image processing tasks. In the second to last day of classes, stu-
dents worked on the Moon and Hubble activities, which were scheduled in sequence and lasted about 50 minutes each.
Both activities included several subtasks that posed substantive challenges to students and required coordinated use
of multiple tools in the visualization toolbox. For instance, in Moon students were asked to compare the relative heights
of moon craters, given only light intensity data. In Hubble, students were to find and count hidden galaxies by selectively
setting various software controls (e.g., min–max sliders) to uncover patterns in the image data (see Figures 1 and 2).
While working on the Moon activity, Dean and Peter showed some clear moments of excitement, curiosity and
investment, and repeatedly used the Palette and Color Making Tools to produce many more palettes than any other
group. During Hubble, color- and palette-creation escalated in that the group began crafting entirely nonstandard
palettes—that is, palettes unsupported by resources in our Palette Making Tool—which they then used to render the
images of galaxies (Figure 2). To do so, they independently figured out some specifics of the Boxer software inter-
face so that they could directly edit the numerical RGB (red–green–blue) values of individual color elements of a
given palette—a decisively nontrivial achievement. Noticing that the insertion of a highly contrastive color element
(see arrow in Figure 2) produced a striking visual effect on the image, Dean and Peter ventured into producing more
nonstandard palettes, laboriously creating and arraying individual color elements that made for truly unique combina-
tions and displays. Eventually, they created a palette that interspersed black and white elements and which came to be
known as the zebra palette (see Hubble image rendered in Figure 2). Similar to contour lines in topographical maps, a
zebra palette has the effect of highlighting contour regions (or bands). And in so doing, the zebra palette allowed the
group to uncover a galaxy hidden from all other participants in the room, including peers, teacher, and researchers.
AZEVEDO 117

F I G U R E 2 (a) Hubble image of galaxies rendered with Dean and Peter's black-and-white zebra palette; (b) various
palettes saved by Dean and Peter while working on the Hubble activity. The arrow points to the first nonstandard
palette created by the group [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

Retrospective analyses of data records show that, prior to this episode, Dean and Peter had been “poking around”
the Boxer environment, also in an attempt to create unusual palettes. On those occasions, however, they were work-
ing toward acquainting themselves with the Color and Palette Making Tools, as well as other parts of the toolset.
The group was unsuccessful then, but clearly learned important aspects of the software interface that were useful
in subsequent attempts. Motivated to try the idea again, they finally succeeded during the Hubble activity, as we have
seen.
For now, the point to observe is that Dean and Paul's emergent creating unusual palettes and displays interest—the
intense, focused, if short-lived pursuit of the emergent activity of color and palette creation—had been triggered much
earlier than the episode above, but somehow it did not immediately take hold in any of these students’ personal fabric of
activities. The Moon and Hubble episodes therefore represent an uptake of an earlier form of activity, most prominently
by Dean, who took the lead for most of the Moon and Hubble work (Azevedo, 2006).
So, what do we learn from this analysis? To begin, we can readily identify a number of discontinuities in Dean and
Peter's initial pursuit and eventual uptake and sustaining of the activity (for about an hour). Certainly, the context
of computer-based scientific image processing, and specifically palette making and use, was new to the group and it
seemed to have caught much of their attention in the overall context of computer-based work throughout the course.
In addition, the uniqueness of the Boxer interface and numerical RGB (red-green-blue) representation of colors were
novel to all students—and Dean and Peter certainly took time to inspect and decode it. Finally, manipulating images of
galaxies and Moon craters was a first-time occurrence as well, with the Hubble image of galaxies receiving particular
attention from both students.
118 AZEVEDO

At the same time, we find that such emergent interest also reflected various continuities with activities in both stu-
dents’ larger and local life space. For one, Dean had an artistic background that had been clearly expressed in other con-
texts of the course. When designing paper-and-pencil representations of model terrain, for example, Dean described
how he used drawing techniques and perspectives that he had learned in out-of-school, specialized art classes that he
enjoyed much. Palette making to create artistic displays (while of a scientific character) was therefore a neighboring
context in which to engage those artistic skills and long-standing pursuits. Likewise, as a lab group, Dean and Peter
had built a local history of playfulness and often approached proposed tasks the same way, sometimes steering them
in directions very different from those intended by the teacher. Attempting to bend the Moon and Hubble activities
was thus another context for the group's style of exploration and which they duly exercised. In turn, this found explicit
support (i.e., another continuity) in stable classroom culture and norms that encouraged student initiative and prob-
lem posing. Finally, both students had home computers and reported strong use of their machines; doing “computer
work” in the contexts of Moon and Hubble was therefore continuous with out-of-school patterns of activity and the
open Boxer environment was quite accommodating of their classroom goals and style.
As we can see, therefore, the emergent, new interest bears substantive continuities with other interests, prefer-
ences, and pursuits in Dean and Peter's lives. Indeed, prior interests and activity forms in Dean and Peter's repertoires
are crucially involved in the triggering and eventual uptake of palette making for artistic displaying. This represents a shift
from extant conceptions of situational interests. As a rule, the triggering of a situational interest has been centrally
attributed to the action of one or more (perhaps synergistic) discontinuities—such as the novelty, surprise, and struc-
tural features of the task environment—in a person's ongoing experiences (Renninger & Hidi, 2016; Schiefele, 2009;
Silvia, 2006). But as shown above, a variety of continuities are also centrally implicated in that process—that is, they are
part and parcel of the motivational structure of a situational interest.
By the same token, framing situational interests from the continuity + discontinuity perspective provides us an
initial model for describing how emergent interests are taken up and develop. As I will continue to argue, insofar as
situational interests are conceptualized as essentially discontinuous experiences, it is difficult to conceive how dis-
continuities might eventually become a part of a person's life. But by closely following continuities and discontinuities
impinging on, and co-occurring in the emergence of a new interest, we capture the organic relationship between the
various activities within which such an interest emerges. In fact, because discontinuities arise in reflexive relationship
to activity continuities, we can see how dimensions of emergent and ongoing activities are systematically interrelated
in triggering and retriggering events. To resort to the fabric metaphor, we can trace the process whereby previously
hanging thread segments are woven into a person's fabric of activities and we can map out how they develop over
time—say, by following how the new thread is extended onto other parts of the fabric.

5.2 Continuities and discontinuities in an amateur astronomer's long-term practice

Let us now consider situational interest phenomena in the context of a person's (Mitchell) well-developed individual
interest in amateur astronomy (Azevedo, 2013). As previously mentioned, I consider two cases of emergent interests
(Cases 2 and 3, for numerical reference). In the first case, a situational interest is triggered but it dies out after a short
period of time and it is never pursued again. In the second, an emergent interest is spottily practiced after its first
appearance, then taken up intensely after a few years. In both cases, dimensions of continuity and discontinuity in
activity participation become conspicuously visible against the larger backdrop of Mitchell's long-term pursuit of the
hobby.

5.2.1 Case 2: A situational interest not taken up

In his notebook entry for the 7/21/2001 observational night at Mt Hillside, Mitchell described getting involved in a
playful social exchange that emerged toward the end of the night, as he was about to pack his equipment and leave:
“At this point, I wound up on a ‘shootout’ of light pollution filters. The contest was between my O-III filter, versus Jack's
Orion Ultrablack Filter. The target was the Swan Nebula (M17, also known as the Omega Nebula). The initial view of
the Swan nebula without the filter was not overwhelming. Two fans of gas combined to make a visible wedge, with an
AZEVEDO 119

additional spurt off to one angle to create a vague impression of a swan. Putting on the O-III filter changes the situation
dramatically; more structure was visible in the central (swan) element, whereas the region of the sky surrounding the
nebula showed delicate filaments and other regions of added detail. The amount of added detail was truly impressive.
The O-III outperformed the Ultrablack Filter. Both were in very similar (10″ F/7) scopes at similar magnification (32 vs.
40 mm on Jack's scope). The sky background was darker through the O-III, and more of the nebula detail was visible.
Both filters were better than the normal, unfiltered view.”
Analysis of the ethnographic record shows that this was truly a one-off occurrence—that is, an activity that Mitchell
had never engaged prior to that night and which he would never reengage throughout the years of research—and it
emerged as part of the ongoing flow of interactions among various participants in the field. The activity was somewhat
short lived, lasting only a few minutes, and he participated actively in it, certainly learning some important lessons in
the process (e.g., about differences in optical filters). And yet, it was extinguished and never reoccurred. As a whole,
therefore, this is an exemplar case of a situational interest that is not taken up—one which failed to be knitted onto
Mitchell's immediate fabric of activities.
As an exemplar of situational interests, this episode also clearly illustrates both discontinuities and continuities
implicated in the emergence of this novel form of activity in Mitchell's practice. Most prominently, a discontinuity is
revealed in the playful, “competitive” character of the exchanges, in which celestial observations are made into a zero-
sum game of sorts. And we can be sure this is indeed a discontinuity because it had never occurred in his practice before.
Observing a filtered view through Jack's telescope is another readily identifiable discontinuity in Mitchell's stream of
experiences.
At the same time, there were many dimensions of continuity cutting through the new activity's core. Four are imme-
diately apparent. First, the kind of competitive genre Mitchell and others enacted is most obviously continuous with
larger cultural patterns of competition common to Western societies—here performed in a healthy form of impromptu
play among peers and acquaintances. In fact, and second, the relaxed nature of amateur astronomy field practice
was often playful and friendly, with plenty of social interactions fostered. Third, comparing views across individual
astronomers’ telescopes was a common occurrence in the field and extending it on-the-fly to comparing filtered views
appeared natural. Fourth, forming small groups around observational goals was common routine in collective practice
of amateur astronomy clubs and Mitchell and Jack's mock competition stemmed partly from those routines.
To summarize, this analysis lends further credence to framing situational interests as simultaneously continuous and
discontinuous with one's prior experiences. As in Case 1, such lens allows us to map out and explain, with some degree
of precision and completeness, the emergence, prior history, short duration, and extinguishing of the locally cued inter-
est. In fact, it shows that it would be impossible to account for Mitchell's activity participation without recourse to both
continuities and discontinuities that constitute it and give it meaning.
Additionally, Case 2 sheds further light on the overall character of interests and their phenomenology. Specifically,
it compellingly illustrates how a situational interest is triggered within the context of a well-developed (individual)
interest—namely, Mitchell's long-term, stable, and mature practice of amateur astronomy. While this may seem a trivial
observation, it is an understudied aspect of the dynamics and functioning of situational interests, as indicated by Ren-
ninger and Hidi's (2016) observation: “It is now clear that situational interest can be triggered in earlier as well as later
phases of interest development” (p. 11). We thus have “proof” that the typical transient nature of situational interest—
that is, its short-term duration, with no subsequent activity uptake—can also obtain in the context of a tightly and richly
woven area of one's fabric of activities.
By the same token, and extending the analysis in Case 1, in the formulation proposed here we can begin to elucidate
how a situational interest may play a role in the further development of a well-developed interest in a practice. While
Mitchell never reengaged playful observational competition (in the context of filtered views of otherwise), that single
event clearly led him to learn about how telescope optical filters perform differently and the value of comparing scope
views more generally. In turn, this knowledge may eventually serve as a basis (if partial) for his developing new obser-
vational skills and forms of participation in the practice. Following how discontinuities and continuities are woven into
a person's fabric of activities helps us grasp how they bear mutual linkages that can further extend into future activity,
as well as how learning is part of this process.
120 AZEVEDO

5.2.2 Case 3: Taking up an interest, after years of transient attempts at it

Toward the very end of the ethnographic period, Mitchell began a somewhat intense pursuit of astronomical drawing,
as part of his observational practice.2 As it turned out, Mitchell had just lost his job and, as he put it, he now had plenty
of time to dedicate to his hobby. Around the same time, a project came out in Sky & Telescope magazine (the most regu-
lar of his readings) detailing celestial sketching in the context of Solar observations and the award (SunSpotter Award)
that followed from submitting the drawings to the Astronomical League. Mitchell embarked on the project and award.
To begin, he bought a full set of charcoal markers, pencils, and special drawing paper and began a nearly daily routine
of Sun sketching through his smallest telescope, conveniently set up on his home sidewalk. From that point on, obser-
vational drawing seemed to take off and endured in Mitchell's practice, as it spread into other aspects of his hobby,
beyond Solar observing. Was that the emergence and sustained pursuit of a new interest (i.e., a novel form of activity)
in Mitchell's practice?
Scrutinizing Mitchell's observational notebooks, we find that drawing astronomical objects is an activity that dates
back to the early years of his hobby, and they appear very scantily (once every few months on average) in the books
since then. So celestial drawing had emerged as a novel form of activity long before the SunSpotter Award con-
text and the event above is its reemergence and uptake. For reasons I could not pinpoint, it took nearly 3 years
for a retrigger that finally made celestial sketching “stick”—that is, for it to become a sustained activity form within
Mitchell's long-term, highly involved hobby (see Azevedo, 2013). And sustained it did become, as Mitchell has pro-
duced 51 sketches of the Sun, 27 of Nebulae, 26 of Mars, and 19 galaxies, among many others since the beginning
of the award work. Figure 3 shows two of Mitchell's sketches, executed at very different points in his astronomy
career.
As before, having identified the moment of retriggering we can then follow the ethnographic records upstream for
traces of discontinuities and continuities that constituted that moment. Regarding discontinuities, we find first that
Mitchell engaged drawing only in the context of his hobby. Second, losing his job is a discontinuity in his life that opens
crucial time, at the right time of the day and the right place (home), to engage drawing. In this regard, losing the job is
functionally equivalent to supporting factors known to sustain interest-based engagement, such as time on task. Third,
the SunSpotter Award was new to his practice, something he had never done before. Fourth, the large array of drawing
implements that he acquired was entirely new to his hobby and life, and indeed a significant part of what made the
project strongly appealing to him.
As in Cases 1 and 2, activity continuities running through the retriggering of Mitchell's astronomical drawing inter-
est abound. To begin, he was fond of pursuing awards and the SunSpotter context was a natural continuation of that
pattern of hobby participation. Second, Mitchell had observed the Sun before and intended to continue observing it
beyond the drawing and award contexts, which shows an enduring and valued (if not core) aspect of his practice. Third,
as Mitchell himself put it, observational drawing was a key practice for improving one's observational skills and very
much a routine of “serious observers,” a kind of astronomer hobbyist with whom he identified. To engage in drawing
the Sun was to work toward this enduring goal. Fourth, he enjoyed (and repeatedly practiced) observing from home,
which he found a convenient setting for some limited, but valued forms of observation. Fifth, pursuing drawing and
the award afforded using his small telescope, which he cherished for its practical setup and quality. Sixth, observing
from the sidewalk also allowed Mitchell to entertain and teach passers-by on the joys of astronomical observation, a
practice that he continuously engaged in through outreach programs of the club. Seventh and finally, acquiring sophis-
ticated drawing implements as part of engaging the SunSpotter award is continuous with patterns of behavior beyond
the hobby proper. Materially, Mitchell had a broader “interest” in stationery objects—perhaps best expressed in his
large collection of fountain pens and ink—and paid regular visits to a famous, neighborhood oriented, well-stocked
arts-and-stationery store. Expanding on those interests as part of engaging celestial drawing was seemingly a natural
choice (from his perspective). So, once again, we see that multiple continuities and discontinuities operate in tandem in
the genesis and reemergence of a situational interest. And as with Dean and Peter's pursuit of palette making for artis-
tic display (Case 1), we find multiple continuities—in the form of parallel, more enduring individual interests—interact
felicitously in the triggering of a situational interest.
AZEVEDO 121

F I G U R E 3 (a) The first sketch to appear in Mitchell's notebooks (11/25/2000); (b) one of Mitchell's later sketches of
Jupiter, executed with the new crayon infrastructure and after the SunSpotter award (3/6/2003) [Color figure can be
viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

Lastly, as we attend to the dynamics of interest-based participation expressed in this case, we uncover opportuni-
ties for further exploring relationships between situational and individual interests. As in Case 2, here we find a situ-
ational interest that emerges within the context of one's dense and well-developed fabric of activities, and then it is
“touched upon” across time, in quick-and-dirty forms, spottily and casually, and for years never truly taking root in the
person's practice. And then it does indeed reemerge, takes shape and develops, through many activity continuities and
discontinuities, as a full-fledged new form of activity in Mitchell's astronomy career. In the long run, the goal would be
to identify precisely how continuities and discontinuities interact and operate synergistically so that we might write
a “persistence equation” capturing details of any single person's idiosyncratic pursuit of an interest (Azevedo, 2011,
2013; Barron, 2010), from its emergence to its lifelong development (National Research Council, 2009).

6 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

What are the implications of the above arguments and findings? In answering this question, I focus my comments
on interrelated issues of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological character and consider their import for future
research.
Conceptually, we have seen that extant theorizing has conceived of situational interests as fundamentally discontin-
uous experiences in a person's ongoing activity participation. As I elaborated, however, the structure I find to underlie
122 AZEVEDO

a situational interest comprises both continuities and discontinuities, rather than the latter alone (or even predomi-
nantly). As such, my theorizing has been corrective (Hall & Stevens, 2016) in that it restores what has been commonly
left out of existing accounts of the phenomenon—namely, the complex world of multiple, intersecting as well as paral-
lel activities in which one participates at any point in time (Cole, 1998; Greeno & Engeström, 2014; Rogoff, 1997) and
their role on the emergence of situational interests. In doing so, I have argued that activity continuities are core to the
functioning of situational interests most clearly in two ways.
First and foremost, continuities are directly and systematically involved in the triggering of a situational interest. Take
Dean and Peter's interest-based pursuits in the after-school program, for example. For as much as there were discon-
tinuous activity dimensions (i.e., what is conventionally assumed to be triggering elements) in those students’ palette-
making-for-creative-displays situational interest, there were also several activity continuities that patently partici-
pated in its triggering and retriggering. Particularly noteworthy in this regard were Dean's passion for art, as well as
Dean and Peter's home-based use of computers and strong preference for various computer-centered activities, and
finally their constant “bending” of various classroom activities.
Second, while not all activity continuities in one's repertoire take part in any given triggering event, some clearly
co-occur with such an event. Still other continuities may neither participate in triggering nor co-occur with it, and yet
connect the situational interest to one's larger fabric of activities. In both cases, activity continuities act to contextu-
alize and give meaning to emergent, novel activity forms in a person's practice and account for how discontinuities
may eventually be accommodated (woven) into one's fabric of activities. As an illustration, let us return to Mitchell's
triggering and retriggering events of astronomical drawing. We know with certainty that technology-based activities
(e.g., astronomy blogging) stemming from his software engineering background were indirectly related to astronomical
drawing, although not immediately involved in its triggering (refer to Azevedo, 2013, for empirical details on the many
roles that technology played in Mitchell's hobby). Likewise, showing those sketches at Club meetings was not causally
implicated in the emergence of astronomical drawing, but it bore indirect and opportunistic links to it. These observa-
tions suggest a complex substructure for situational interests—one which adds significant details to how we conceive
of, and model situational interests, and which must be the topic of future research.
Beyond these structural concerns, the account of situational interests advanced here also begins to add process
details heretofore missing in the extant literature. Following our adherence to the Vygotskyan notion that the best
way to understand human behavior is to study its history and development (Leont'ev, 1981; Vygotsky, 1978), processes
appear here in our tracking of the history of one's practice participation (Cole, 1998; Greeno & Engeström, 2014) prior
to, during, and following a triggering event. In turn, attention to one's historically well-established forms of participa-
tion reveals activity continuities and their interactions, within and beyond the immediate context of the situational
interest. To exemplify, as we follow a person's moment-to-moment practice participation, we find that some specific
set of continuities and/or discontinuities may more closely or strongly interact at triggering. To return to Dean and
Peter's case, I have emphasized that Dean's connection to art and both students’ strong tendency to eschew assigned
classroom activities were continuities that strongly and decisively interacted to spark the group's palette-making-for-
artistic-displays. Indeed, such activity continuities reappeared at retriggering, which confirms their relative weight
throughout the process of emergence and reemergence of that novel activity form.
In sum, relative to current conceptions of situational interests the more encompassing structural model and process
account proposed here affords a more holistic and realistic account of situational interests. Revisiting extant theorizing
and associated empirical work in light of these results should therefore reveal that they are incomplete or imprecise,
rather than invalid.
To be fair, when attempting to interpret the triggering of situational interests, researchers sometimes have resorted
to explanatory “factors” that qualify as continuities from the perspective I have outlined. For instance, in some cases
students’ prior knowledge and/or valuing (i.e., meaningfulness) an aspect of an activity are said to be involved in trig-
gering a situational interest (Bergin, 2016; Dohn, 2010; Renninger & Bachrach, 2015). These accounts are closer in
spirit to the one developed here in that they produce a more inclusive and explanatorily adequate description of the
phenomenon. Lacking a larger a more complete structural and process framework in which to fit these observations,
such work misses that knowing and valuing come “packaged” within activities (Cole, 1998; Greeno & Engeström, 2014;
AZEVEDO 123

Saxe, 1991, 1996) and their multiple dimensions, such that more continuities should be visible at triggering and retrig-
gering, either as causal force or indirectly. At a deep level, these accounts fail to capture the organic and systemic link
between the situational interest (i.e., the emergent, new form of activity) and the person's broad life space, and thus
where a situational interest comes from, how it comes to be, and where it might go.
It follows from these considerations that because my theorizing concerns the very nature of a situational interest—
its underlying structure and mechanisms—the implications of my conjecture can be profound. The issue of interest
development, for example, becomes tractable in that developmental dynamics can be seen directly in the changing rela-
tionships and interactions between various continuities and discontinuities that are manifested across triggering and
retriggering events. Briefly, one could study interest development as follows:

1. First, identify all activity continuities and discontinuities present at the moment of triggering—both directly imping-
ing on, and co-occurring with it. To achieve adequate descriptive precision, this necessitates some longitudinal pro-
cess data covering a person's practice participation in significant detail (say, a student in science class or a museum
visitor inspecting an exhibit). Because of the short timescale of triggering events, video is the medium of choice for
data collection (Hall, 2000).
2. Search for relationships among the identified continuities and discontinuities and look to uncover the deeper struc-
ture of the triggering event. As we have considered, by the very nature of activities and how they play out in one's
daily life, some continuities and/or discontinuities will be more closely interrelated (or linked) than others, perhaps
lending to synergies and other interactional effects that further affect the emergence, uptake, and sustained pur-
suit of an interest. As in the above analyses, the better we detail those relationships and peculiarities, the better we
can understand the triggering moment and the nature of the continuities/discontinuities implicated.
3. Finally, look for the different forms that the novel activity form takes over time (if at all). To do so, follow how
relationships and interactions between continuities/discontinuities (item 2) have shifted or not, whether new
relationships have been forged, and so on. Triggering and retriggering events will likely have distinct continu-
ities/discontinuities makeup, so mapping out these variations over time is also critical. Throughout, refer back to
some key guiding questions: How are individual discontinuities appropriated into one's fabric of activities? How do
such discontinuities become sustained activities over time, as they make contact with various proximal and distal
threads in the fabric? How does the overall fabric change as a result? In a complementary manner, what can be said
about the relationships between continuities and discontinuities when a situational interest fails to take hold? What
does the fabric look like in the vicinity of ruptures in individual threads?

Incidentally, the “exercise” of following interest development, as laid out above, also serves the important function
of testing out the model I have proposed. I have developed my conjecture based on theoretical arguments and three
in-depth empirical cases, and there are natural limitations to those methods (Becker, 2014; Creswell, 2013). Further
research will tell the extent to which the model is accountable to data collected under various circumstances and learn-
ing contexts.
Lastly, methodologically we learn (perhaps unexpectedly) that possibly the most insightful context in which to inves-
tigate situational interests is that of well-developed, individual interests. Because most research in the field has been
conducted in the achievement spaces of formal schooling (Weiner, 1990) and because students are often assumed to
have no prior interest that might bear on school activities (e.g., Hidi & Harackiewicz, 2000), there has been little investi-
gation on the functioning of individual interests and even less so on the relationship between situational and individual
interests (Renninger & Hidi, 2016). But as we saw in the case of Mitchell's long-term and intense pursuit of amateur
astronomy, exploring such a relation might lend a crucial analytical precision to investigations of situational interests.
This is because one's fabric of activities is thickly woven in and around areas of individual interests and thus activ-
ity continuities are more easily made visible in long-term process data (see Azevedo, 2011, 2013). Reflexively, we can
also more easily single out emergent activity discontinuities and how they stand in relation to various threads in one's
larger fabric. In all, this means that within the context of a well-developed interest we can better capture the details
124 AZEVEDO

of the historical origins, emergence, dynamic enactment, and development of a situational interest. Lessons learned in
this context can then be applied to investigating situational interests across their developmental span and contexts.
In closing, it is my hope that the work reported here will open up a variety of new research avenues that continue to
push the boundaries of our understanding of situational and individual interests, the theoretical precision with which
we model these phenomena, and the research methods we deploy in these investigations, all of which might in turn
inform how we go about designing learning environments that are truly interest-driven.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their insights, comments on, and suggestions to earlier drafts of
the manuscript. I am also grateful to Katy Massucco for her expert assistance with the images. This paper is based, in
part, on work supported by grants RED-9553902 and REC-9973156 from the National Science Foundation to Andrea
A. diSessa, PI, and by a Dissertation Year Fellowship from the Spencer Foundation. The views espoused here are those
of the author and do not reflect those of the granting agencies.

ENDNOTES
1 Inthis formulation, new activity threads may be added to one's fabric of activities that result from situational interests but
also from a number of other life concerns and events, such as moving to a new school or across the country, shifting job
demands, and economic upswings or downturns.
2 Briefly,
astronomical drawing consists in sketching a celestial object while observing it. The practice is meant to help honing
one's observational skills (Dickinson & Dyer, 2013).

ORCID
Flávio S. Azevedo http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4059-2867

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How to cite this article: Azevedo FS. An inquiry into the structure of situational interests. Sci Ed. 2018;
102:108–127. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21319