Curriculum Mismatch as the Source of Boredom

In this month's issue of Educational Leadership there's an interesting article titled Boredom and Its Opposite.

"If, as research indicates and many teachers suspect, student achievement is more highly correlated with student interests than with cognitive ability, then we should make curriculum design based on human interests a primary focus for professional development during the next decade. It's time to make students and their natural human interests as important as the standards and tests that our states now mandate."

The authors boil it down to four sources of interest: mastery, understanding, interpersonal and self-expression. They point to an instrument that let's you see how individual learner profiles differ along these four dimensions and give a rubric for measuring a particular lesson or unit.

Not a bad article, though after going through the readings in this course I think you'll see that there are more than four dimensions. But four is a good start.