Intervention for External Variables of Boredom

Academicians learned that boredom relates to a wide of conflicting outcomes. Although changing the internal (psychological) causes of boredom can be a little difficult for an educator, identifying and managing external factors is affordable for many. Identifying the proneness of boredom is the preventive measure for academic dropouts.?

Addressing Boredom

Engagement is a complex paradigm and has to do with task participation, emotional engagement, and cognitive assignation. These three components are interrelated and critical to measure to analyze academic dropouts. Having emotional engagement and cognitive activities as fundamental, Appleton, Christenson, & Kim (2006) has developed an engagement instrument known as SEI (student engagement instrument) to measure learners' levels of cognitive and psychological engagement.

Inspired by SEI, we developed an engagement instrument to measure the engagement rate in our course in multiple dimensions; (1) Control and Relevance of Course Work (CRCW), (2) Future Aspiration & Goal (FAG), (3) Intrinsic Motivation (IM), (4) Educator Learner Relationship (ELR), and (5) Peer Support (PS). You may refer to our engagement instrument here.?

Improving Learning Environment

Emotions are intimately involved in every aspect of the teaching and learning process. When addressing the cause of boredom in the learning environment, it is crucial to look at the types of tasks presented, individual learners, and learners-environment fit. Improving the clarity of instruction and structure of delivery by engaging learners increases the learner's sense of control over their learning and helps them value the content more.

Educators who present challenging tasks that are not beyond the learner's capacity would reduce boredom in the learning environment. However, when the learning environment is diverse, an educator could adjust the instructions toward the class's middle ability or competency level.?

Encourage Mastery Goals

Goal structure can be individualistic, competitive, and cooperative. For example, the individual goal involves mastery over materials individually, whereas a competitive situation requires group performance goals. In a collaborative position, the purpose is linked to peer interactions. Different purposes provide different chances of success and will affect students' perceived control. Therefore, emphasizing the mastery approach should encourage task behaviours and discourage off-task behaviours and anxiety.

However, educators need to be careful not to focus too much on goals that could interfere with the enjoyment of learning. A good educator delicate the balance of goals while conveying enthusiasm about the content.?

Active Learning

Active learning is learner-centred, and learners become engaged by doing something meaningful and thinking about it. Teaching strategies that foster active learning have several commonalities: students are doing something rather than simply listening; the goal is skill development as opposed to information gathering; thinking skills are involved; students are engaged in an activity, and students' attitudes and values are a focus. Therefore, the critical element of active learning is learner interactive activity and engagement.

Interactive activity has significantly reduced learners' boredom, and considerable research supports the idea of active learning or interactive teaching strategies?(Mora, 2011). Interactive learning includes small group discussions, brainstorming, debates, write-pair-share activities, role-play, collaborative learning, cooperative learning, games, etc. (Farrell, 2009; Prince, 2004).