Sustaining Interest

According to Edmund J. Hansen's article "Creating Teachable Moments... and Making Them Last" in Innovative Higher Education (23.1:7-26), getting students' attention isn't enough to motivate their involvement in a course or to sustain interest in a discipline of study. For sustaining interest, Hansen suggests

	relating course content to students' lives
	causing students to examine what they value and believe related to issues in the discipline
	guiding students to see how their personal strengths can contribute to success in the field
	developing study skills in the discipline because they are concrete and because they show how students can learn useful material
	training students to use self-assessment to see their progress in a discipline, especially by having them write about particular goals, ways to improve, and experiences

Summarized in The Teaching Professor 12.10 [Dec.] 1998:2-3.

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