Current research results of both national and international large scale assessments analysing the development and facilitation of students’ learning motivation and interest in mathematics instruction (e.g. PISA 2003; TIMSS; Baumert et al., 2000; German PISA-Consortium, 2004; Kunter, 2005; Rakoczy, 2008) show that both, the learning motivation and the students’ interest in mathematics are relatively low and decrease considerably during their school career. Two major reasons are generally given to account for this decline: The students’ perceived emotional experiences during class and different aspects of the instructional quality (Rakoczy et al., 2007). Nonetheless, the functional relationship between the students’ emotional experiences, the instructional quality, and the students’ interest in mathematics is not yet fully explained when individual lessons are taken into consideration. In order to approach this research question, the concept of situational interest is a promising theoretical framework (e.g. Hidi & Renninger, 2006; Mitchell, 1993). This construct describes a content related motivational quality which develops in a certain learning situation and mainly depends on situational and topic specific aspects of the learning environment as well as on the current emotional experiences of the students. Here, assumptions of the self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2002) are taken into account. It is postulated that the fulfilment of the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are major prerequisites for both the facilitation of self-determined motivation and the support of interest development. Furthermore, the situational interest can be divided into two succeeding developmental phases: the catch phase, which describes the first occurrence of interest in a learning situation and the hold phase, which is characterised by the maintenance of interest (c.f. Hidi, 2006). The presented study investigates the relationship between the situational interest of students in mathematics instruction, their emotional experiences and their perception of the instructional quality of a math lesson, especially taking into account the two developmental phases of the situational interest.

Within the questionnaire study, N = 951 8th grade students from N = 38 different classes were surveyed immediately after a math lesson dealing with the topic linear functions. In addition to measuring different qualities of the current learning motivation as well as the catch and hold phases of the situational interest of the students, the questionnaire included newly developed scales assessing the students’ emotional experience. Here, we distinguished between the experience of competence, two different facets of the experience of autonomy and two facets of the experience of relatedness (teachers and classmates as reference groups). Additionally, different aspects of the instructional quality were assessed.

The results obtained by multiple linear regression analyses revealed that the function of the emotional experiences of autonomy, competence, and relatedness for the students’ situational interest varies depending on the different developmental phases of the situational interest under consideration: A high predictive power of the emotional experiences can be found for the catch phase, whereas the predictive power of the students’ emotional experiences is significantly lower for the hold phase. Similar results can be observed for the relationship between the students’ perception of the instructional quality and their situational interest