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IDC theory: habit and the habit loop

Pi, Zhongling

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Research

Open access

Published: 14 May 2020

Tak Wai Chan2,

Lung Hsiang Wong1,

Chee Kit Looi1,

Calvin C. Y. Liao3,

Hercy N. H. Cheng4,

Su Luan Wong5,

Jon Mason6,

Hyo-Jeong So7,

Sahana Murthy8,

Xiaoqing Gu9 &

…
Zhongling Pi1

Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning volume 15,

Article number: 10 (2020) Cite this article

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Abstract

Interest-driven creator (IDC) theory is a design theory that intends to

inform the design of future education in Asia. It consists of three
anchored concepts, namely, interest, creation, and habit. This paper
presents the third anchored concept habit as well as the habit loop. IDC
theory assumes that learners, when driven by interest, can be engaged
in knowledge creation. Furthermore, by repeating such process in their
daily learning routines, learners will form interest-driven creation habits.
The habit loop, the process of building such a habit, consists of three
component concepts—cuing environment, routine, and harmony. The
cuing environment is a habit trigger that tells the students’ brain to get
prepared and go into an automatic mode, letting a learning behavior
unfold. Routine refers to the behavioral patterns the students repeat
most often, literally etched into their neural pathways. Harmony refers to
the affective outcome of the routine activity as well as the integration or
stabilization of habits; that is, through the routine behavior and action,
students may feel that their needs get fulfilled, feel satisfied, and
experience inner peace. It is our hope that such habitual behavior of
creating knowledge can be sustained so long that students ultimately
become lifelong interest-driven creators. This paper focuses on the
description of the three components of the habit loop and discusses how
these components are related to the interest loop and the creation loop in
supporting learners in developing their interest-driven creation capability.

Introduction

Researchers, educators, and parents have long acknowledged the

importance of cultivating students’ good habits for learning. Learning
involves a persistent and stable change in what a person knows or does.
Learning habits exercise significant influences over students’ learning
and development. The influential Chinese author and educator Yeh
Sheng-Tao stated “what is education? To answer it in a simple way, we
just need one statement: nurturing good habits.” Habit is a routine of
behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur unconsciously.
From the viewpoint of psychologists, habit is understood as "a more or
less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous
repetition of mental experience (Andrews 1903, p.1). As Ronis et al.
(1989) mentioned, “habits are the result of automatic cognitive
processes, developed by extensive repetition, so well learned that they
do not require conscious effort (p. 219)”. The online Oxford Dictionary
(2014) defines habit as “a settled or regular tendency or practice,
especially one that is hard to give up” and “an automatic reaction to a
specific situation.”

Currently, Asians are still examination-driven educational culture,

governed by the short-term goal of obtaining high scores in examinations
(Chan et al. 2018). Thus, forming good habits of learning, especially
interest-driven learning, has not been sufficiently considered in formal
schooling. However, when it comes to skill development, practice is
understood as essential (Raisbeck et al. 2015). To face the fast-changing
world, citizens must develop and adopt habits of lifelong learning and
acquire skills such as complex problem solving, collaboration and
communication, critical thinking and reflection, and creativity and
imagination (Chan 2013; Griffin et al. 2012).

Given the previously mentioned educational challenge and expectation,

a group of Asian researchers came together collaboratively to propose a
macro-level theory called interest-driven creator (IDC) theory. The
preliminary work giving an overview of IDC theory and highlighting its
origin with some history was published in 2018 (Chan et al. 2018).
According to IDC theory, when driven by interest, students can be
engaged in the creation of knowledge (ideas and artifacts). By repeating
this interest-driven creation process in their daily learning routines,
students will develop twenty-first century skills, form a habit of creation,
and excel in learning.

This paper is last in a three-part series of IDC theory which examines in

detail the third anchored concept—habit. It focuses on how habits are
built through interest-driven creation activities undertaken as daily
learning routines. The two other papers focus on:

Interest, which examined the first anchored concept of IDC emphasizing

the significance of promoting student learning through interest;

Creation, which examined the second anchored concept of IDC

emphasizing student learning through creation activities and the design
of interest-driven creations.

Interest and creation, as described in the two preceding papers, are not
just concepts for educators to perceive and understand. IDC theory calls
for actions by practicing in everyday routines. The ultimate goal of IDC
theory is to nurture our next generation to become lifelong interest-driven
creators. Only by forming a habit of interest-driven creation—a habit
hopefully sustaining for life—can the ultimate goal be realized. If interest
talks about why we learn and creation about how we learn, then habit
talks about how often we learn in order to realize the learning goal. Given
that creation is a complex cognitive process, building a habit of creation
is a long-term undertaking.

Habit

Building up good habit is a fundamental issue for human life because our
behavior is largely affected by our habits. To some degree, our habits
define who we are. Many philosophers, psychologists, and educators
have emphasized the importance of habit. The notion of habits of mind
encapsulates many prior discussions (Costa and Kallick 2008). The
pioneering psychologist and philosopher James (1890) states in his talks
to teachers: “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of
habits.” Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle famously proclaimed:
“We are what we repeatedly do.” “Excellence, then, is not an act, but a
habit.” The same goes for the reverse: problems and failure can become
habits too. Those who have formed good habits have higher chance to
excel in various aspects of life.

According to Azikiwe (1998), “good study habits are good assets to

learners because the (habits) assist students to attain mastery in areas
of specialization and consequent excellent performance, while opposite
constitute constraints to learning and achievement leading to failure.”
The learning habit greatly determines not only students’ academic
achievements but also their success in the future (Chan et al. 2018;
Ebele and Olofu 2017).

Students’ achievements due to good habit have a cumulative effect on

their future success. Therefore, those students who have developed
good learning habits earlier continue to sustain and increase the learning
gains while those students who have not had good learning habits have
a harder time catching up—essentially, the stronger gets ever stronger
while the weaker only gets weaker, due to learning habits. This is
consistent with the research findings that suggest that prior learning
performance of an experience is a good predictor of future learning
(Jonassen and Grabowski 1993). This exactly illustrates Nathaniel
Emmons’ saying that “habit is either the best of servants or the worst of
masters”.

Some researchers have attempted to cultivate students’ good learning

habits to make them as lifelong learners with the twenty-first century
competencies, such as critical and creative thinking, self-regulated
learning, problem solving, and collaborative learning skills. Such habits
of mind (or habits of thought, as John Dewey originally referred to them)
require little or no effort on the part of the child to initiate or sustain them
and would include inclinations to take responsible risks, persistence,
manage impulsivity, and think ‘outside the box’ in problem-solving
situations (Whitebread and Bingham 2013). Costa and Kallick (2008)
explain how habits of mind may be cultivated in children. They show how
children can be taught, at home and at school, how to “habituate”
effective problem-solving strategies and techniques into their mental
repertoire, so that they develop the propensity for skillful problem-solving
in a variety of real life settings. Good learning habits can be formed in
student’s schooling and be sustained lifelong.

Habit can be classified into three types. The first is motor habits which
refer to the muscular activities of an individual (Rueda-Orozco and
Robbe 2015). These are the habits related to our physical actions such
as standing, sitting, running, walking, doing exercise, and maintaining
particular postures of body. The second type is intellectual/cognitive
habits which are related to psychological process requiring our
intellectual abilities such as good observation, accurate perception,
logical thinking, use of reasoning ability before taking decisions and
testing conclusions, and others (Hertel and Brozovich 2010). The third
type is habits of character. Some of our characters are expressed in the
form of habits (Peterson et al. 2017). For example, helping others,
trusting people, time management, and being hardworking. These habits
will have essence of feelings and emotions; hence, these are also called
as emotional habits. In this paper, the term habit is widened from the oft-
repeated action or an established practice or custom requiring little
thought (such as brushing teeth or adding sugar to one’s coffee) to mean
unconscious mental propensities or processes, revealed as behavioral
tendencies and dispositions as the student engages with the events and
challenges of learning especially in the context of interest-driven
creation.

In educational and learning contexts, not only individual students

develop the habit of learning but also groups develop habitual routines in
response to recurring questions and become accepted practice-actions
taken without consciously considering alternatives. A habitual routine or
script exists when a group repeatedly exhibits a functionally similar
pattern of behavior in a given stimulus situation without explicitly
selecting it over alternative ways of behaving (Gersick and Hackman
1990, p.69). Likewise, IDC theory applies to both individuals and groups.
Students often engage in group activities when they are creating
knowledge or artifacts. The groups require at least some routinization of
behavior to get work accomplished, while they are able to predict the
responses of other individuals for coordinated action to be possible.
Group routinization contributes to predictability.
Formation of habit

To cultivate good habits of students for interest-driven creation, we need

to have a deep understanding of habit formation. Habit formation is the
process by which new behaviors become automatic (Bargh 1994). A
habit is a regularly repeated behavior pattern: a routine that is practiced
frequently and hard to stop. Habit formation is the process by which new
behaviors become automatic (Bargh 1994). While the link between
habits and learning is widely recognized, there is much less research
that investigates how learning habits are formed in various
circumstances with different learners. An example of such research is
Lally et al.’s (2010) study on how to promote habit formation. They
explored on strategies to initiate a new behavior, support context-
dependent repetition of this behavior (cuing environment), and facilitate
the development of automaticity. Lally and her colleagues also provided
the assumption that repeating a behavior in a consistent setting
increases automaticity. Moreover, the term, habit, refers to a behavior
that is done automatically with little thought.

As James (1890) put it, “Any sequence of mental action which has been
frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself; so that we find ourselves
automatically prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been before
accustomed to think, feel, or do, under like circumstances, without any
consciously formed purpose, or anticipation of results” (p.439). This
simply means that we tend to repeatedly do the same thing under similar
circumstances. Durhigg (2012) added a term “reward” and considered
that a habit can be thought of as being composed of three parts: a cue, a
routine, and a reward. Adapting James’ and subsequent Durhigg’s
framework, we proposed a habit formation framework to guide the
design of a coherent learning process that encompasses a series of
learning tasks. This habit loop consists of three components: cuing
environment (arrangement of place, time, people, or incidents), routine
(repetitive pattern of activities), and harmony (an outcome of activating
the habit), forming the habit loop (Fig. 1). We will delineate the habit loop
and discuss how such a “habit loop” can be integrated in the design of
learning activities with the ultimate aim of nurturing lifelong learners.

Fig. 1

The habit loop

Full size image

Cuing environment

Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior (Clear

2018). A cuing environment can serve as a habit trigger for automatic
behavior. It is important because it could prompt students to perform the
behavior consistently and then to trigger the learning behavior (Lally and
Gardner 2013). Habits are formed when actions are tied to a trigger by
consistent repetition. When a habit is triggered, people have an
automatic urge to do the action; they sometimes do it without consciously
knowing doing it. For example, brushing teeth is a habit. When most
people wake up in the morning, they go to the bathroom and brush their
teeth automatically, without asking themselves whether they want to do
so in that morning. Occasionally, the action is so automatic that people
may forget later in the day that they had brushed their teeth. An
appropriate cue should be easy to identify by a learner and to influence
habit formation, supporting the development of automaticity.

Psychologists have found that habits are cued by context (Wood and
Neal 2007). Furthermore, there are two forms of contextual cues: direct
cuing and motivated cuing. First, direct cuing refers to repeated
association between routine and environment. Such a continuity may
facilitate the encoding of learning patterns in students’ procedural
memory. For this reason, habits can be developed via providing a
constant environment, for example, reading in the same room at the
same time. Another example is writing a diary. Students tend to do the
writing in the same notebook on the same table at a specific time.
Second, motivated cuing refers to the rewarding experiences in the past.
In other words, previous successful experiences may become a cached
motive to do the same thing (Daw et al. 2005). For doing so, the cuing
environment should include a supporting mechanism, for example,
setting feasible plans before solving a complex learning task, like
creation in STEM education contexts. On the other hand, some research
also shows that a good everyday habit could be disrupted when specific
contexts are changed (Wood et al. 2005).

Routine
The second component of the habit loop is the behavioral patterns we
repeat most often, literally etched into our neural pathways. Through
repetition and practice, it is possible to form (and maintain) new habits in
which new response mechanisms are formed. A good way to start
forming a new habit is to keep it easy and simple, as Lally et al. (2010)
found that complex behaviors took longer time to become habits in
everyday life.

People’s behaviors and actions can be goal directed or habitual. Goal-

directed actions are rapidly acquired and regulated by their outcome.
Habitual actions are reflexive, elicited by antecedent stimuli rather than
their consequences. If people engage in goal-directed behaviors on a
routine basis, it may become habitual. A habit may initially be triggered
by a goal, but over time that goal becomes less necessary and the habit
becomes more automatic. Performance of instrumental actions in rats is
initially sensitive to post-conditioning changes in reward value, but after
more extended training, a behavior comes to be controlled by stimulus–
response (S-R) habits that are no longer goal-directed. It has been
shown that it is possible to change a goal-directed behavior with a
habitual behavior if people are engaged in certain behaviors repeatedly
or on a routine basis (Aarts and Dijksterhuis 2000).

Some research has shown that the number of repetitions required to

form a habit depends on the complexity of the task (Lally et al. 2010). For
example, it will take 18 or fewer days for easy tasks (e.g., riding a bicycle,
drinking more water) and up to 254 days for more complex tasks (e.g.,
going to the gym). Ericsson et al. (1993) argue that it takes as long as 10
years to develop a habit of very high-level performance of complex tasks.
Moreover, van Merriënboer (1997) distinguishes recurrent tasks (e.g.,
those that are performed more or less the same way regardless of
surrounding circumstances) from non-recurrent tasks (e.g., those that
require modifications in performance depending on variations in the
circumstances). Recurrent tasks are more amenable to the formation of
automated responses and the development of habits, whereas non-
recurrent tasks typically require the activation of mental models to
perform some aspects of the task, and, as a result, are not so easily
automated. The literature on habits of mind could be interpreted in part
as referring to how a person develops coping mechanisms to respond to
non-recurrent tasks.

Cognitive scientists often refer to schema and automaticity when

discussing cognitive processes involved in habit formation (Anderson
1992; Schank and Abelson 1977). Since habit refers to a behavior that is
done automatically with little thought, in investigating how learning habits
are formed in various circumstances with different learners, Lally et al.
(2010) explore on strategies to initiate a new behavior, support context-
dependent repetition of this behavior (cuing environment), and facilitate
the development of automaticity by repeating a behavior in a consistent
setting in order to increases automaticity. In sum, habit formation is the
process by which a new behavior, that is, routine, becomes automatic
(Bargh 1994).

Harmony

The third component of the habit loop refers to the result of habit
activation. Through routine behavior and action, people may feel that
their needs get fulfilled and they receive inner rewards (Phillips et al.
2016; Wiedemann et al. 2014). Such rewards may facilitate people to
continue their habit. In our habit loop, we address “harmony” as a
psychological outcome of habit to pursue. Csíkszentmihályi (1991)
describes harmony as “inner congruence” ultimately leading to inner
strength and serenity. For being in harmony, Csíkszentmihályi (1991)
suggested that one should first set up a challenging life goal, and then
make efforts to resolve it. During the processes of resolving the life goal,
one achieves a unified psychological experience.

Harmony means peace, agreement, or concord. A cross-cultural

psychological survey showed that people regarded a sense of inner
harmony as their happiness (Fave et al. 2016). Psychologists have
found that the most important factor of happiness is social and relational;
furthermore, people value their relations with family, lovers, or friends,
which in turn influence their inner peace (Saphire-Bernstein and Taylor
2013). For some people, they value their relations with society. Most
people look forward to a peaceful and healthy environment. For building
it, virtue education is required. As Aristotle said, “happiness is prosperity
combined with virtue,” and “the greatest virtues are those which are most
useful to other persons,” suggesting that to build a virtuous environment
is to establish harmony.

In harmony, people may feel a sense of enjoyment, pleasure, fulfillment,

satisfaction, achievement, and ultimately inner peace. Such feeling of
harmony is usually coupled with their feeling of peacefulness about
surrounding environment, composing people and objects they interact
when they activate the routine behavior. As a consequence, this
psychological experience in the new habit possibly increases a positive
feedback that helps the repetition of the new behavior in the future (Lally
and Gardner 2013; Neal et al. 2012). Because Rothman (2000) also
noticed that “the feeling of satisfaction indicates that the initial decision to
change the behavior was correct” (p. 66), the role of positive feelings is to
reinforce cue-response associations.

When students always acquire the aforementioned positive feelings after

the routine activity, their habit formed becomes a hobby. In other words,
after a habit is formed, with repeated feelings of harmony as the
outcomes of activating the habit, students would behave for interest—
pursuing the routine activity whenever there is opportunity. By continuing
a particular hobby for a long period, students can gain considerable
knowledge and skills in that area of interest.

Habit loop in IDC theory

Habit and interest

Educational researchers and instructional designers investigated the

relationship between interest and habit and how motivation promotes
learning (i.e., result in more time spent on learning tasks) in the context of
habit formation. For example, developing a reading habit is also
developing interest in reading. Once students have the interest, they will
concentrate and make sincere efforts. The notion of interest
encapsulates much of what is called motivation and volition (Keller
2008). To cultivate an interest-driven creator, there is a need to (a)
determine those habits that contribute to interest-driven creation, (b)
identify current and desired habits of learners, (c) determine which
learning habits of learners require additional support and development,
and (d) develop an instructional design framework that fosters the habit
of interest-driven creation.

Learning driven by interest with process mimicking in the creation

process will produce no lasting effect on students unless it is repeated
regularly in daily learning activities to accumulate its effects. To exert a
long-term impact on student learning, a natural way is to cultivate
creation with interest as a habit, desirably a lifelong habit.

Interest and habit can positively reinforce each other. There are two
types of interest: situational interest and individual interest (Hidi and
Renninger 2006). Situational interest refers to focused attention and the
affective reaction triggered in the moment by environmental stimuli, but
situational interest may or may not last over time. Note that situational
interest is similar to triggering interest (arousing curiosity) in the interest
loop (Wong et al. 2020). Individual interest denotes the enduring
tendency to reengage a particular activity overtime with an expectation of
positive feelings based on previous experience. Thus, individual interest
represents internal drive to seek for opportunities to reengage the
activity. Also, since individual interest is similar to hobby—an activity one
does for pleasure when not working—it is desirable that most learning
activities students find as pleasurable as their hobbies so that they can
learn not under any academic pleasure.

To develop interest from situational interest to individual interest, building

habit through scheduled routines in schools has come to play.
Scheduled routines in schools provide students ample opportunities to
participate the activity they have experience of situational interest before.
The more opportunities provided for students to participate such an
activity, the more likely they deepen their interest from situational interest
to individual interest, and, in turn, the more likely they build a habit of this
activity. Thus, interest development and habit formation reinforce each
other.

Habit and creation

Students who value effort perceive ability as a malleable skill and have a
growth mindset; in contrast, those who think intelligence is inherent and
unchangeable exert less effort to succeed and have a fixed mindset
(permanent capacity) (Hochanadel and Finamore 2015). Students’
growth or fixed mindset was evidenced to influence their habit (Yan et al.
2014). For example, a student with growth mindset may be intrinsically
motivated to learn and tend to have a habit of restudying.
Forming a habit of creation is not an easy task. Creation requires a
growth mindset of the students (Dweck 2006). Creation includes
complex cognitive behaviors. While we are more concerned with the
development of complex cognitive behaviors than simple repeated
behaviors, it is challenging to unpack the underlying mechanism of how
a certain cognitive action becomes an automatic behavior, and is
eventually sustained to become a habitual routine behavior in a long
term. The formation and execution of habits involving complex cognitive
behaviors is more than the simple chain of stimulus and response since
one’s habit is highly related to the influence of affective aspects and
cognitive control. Fortunately, creation is composed of three
components; building habit for each of the three components can be
simpler and more effective than that of the fully fledged creation process
(Ericsson et al. 1993).

The recent literature on technology adoption, for instance, has

highlighted the role of habit, emotion, and environmental cues to explain
the habitual continuing use of information technology (De Guinea and
Markus 2009; Lee 2014). This view is dramatically different from the
traditional theoretical view on the continued use of technology (e.g.,
technology acceptance model) that emphasizes the role of intentional
and reasoned actions. De Guinea and Markus (2009) argue that the
habitual use of information communication technology is less driven by
intentional actions but is more driven by triggers in environmental cues.

Likewise, for interest-driven creation activities, it may start as the

intentional and reasoned activities for students; it could become a
habitual routine behavior in a long term. The role of environmental cues
is important in this process. Environmental cues are habit triggers, or
signals to the brain to prepare for an automatic mode, whereby a habit
forms when a behavior is initiated in a consistent cuing environment
(Lally and Gardner 2013). In other words, the arrangement of
environmental cues in creation activities may facilitate students to
become self-directed learners by promoting sustainable learning and
instilling the habits of creation. Students periodically engage in interest-
driven creation tasks with the various loops iterated and repeated.

Interest-driven creation can be triggered by environmental cues in

various creation sub-activities (initiating, combining, and staging). For
example, imitating is concerned with taking in plentiful existing
knowledge and is the preparation process of creation (Chan et al. 2019).
The simplest way of acquiring knowledge is through a change of
response to a single stimulus after repeated exposure to that stimulus.
For example, when we are listening to other people, we are mirroring the
speakers with our tongues as if we are simulating their speech by
speaking the same speech ourselves (Fadiga et al. 2002). When
combining, all concepts and knowledge created are combinations of
existing concepts and knowledge, and all artifacts created are actually
combinations of features of existing artifacts.

The creation activities that students repeat often form a routine, just as
the daily routine governed by the school timetable. Imitating, combining,
and staging, the three components of the creation loop, can repeatedly
happen in the process of interest-driven creation, forming a habitual
routine behavior. Harmony refers to the outcomes of habits of interest-
driven creation. Through routine, students engage with interest; through
harmony, they gain the awareness that their energy has been well
invested and that their needs are fulfilled, they feel a sense of
satisfaction, and they feel at peace with their surroundings and the world
(Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
Habit loop of interest-driven creation

Full size image

Operationalizing the habit loop in school settings

Based on the aforementioned explanation of the habit loop, we attempt

to provide a clearer understanding of how to nurture and reinforce
learning related habits by operationalizing the habit concept within the
context of the school environment through the following four steps:

Start from manageable creation behaviors

To nurture learning habits in IDC, students need to have a good start.

Educators need to get students at a manageable pace. Students will be
overwhelmed if they are to form too many new habits within a short
period of time. Success is more likely to occur when students are
focusing on only one or two changes, which is manageable for them at a
time. Reaching the levels of automaticity is more difficult for complex
behaviors as compared with that of simpler ones (Verplanken and Wood
2006) given that the former involves more thinking processes (Wood et
al. 2002). For this reason, when developing students’ habits, it is easier
for them to start with creation activities which are not too complex. We
can take a spiral progressive approach to get students engaged in more
complex creation activities at a later stage.

Create a cuing environment (a reminder)

If students start to engage in creation work at a specific time for a fixed

length of period, we should provide a cuing environment which makes
them not to hesitate from the beginning. It is effective to remind students
at the beginning of habit formation by clarifying the goal of the learning
activities with the students. If the student knows the purpose of the
activity, he/she can focus on the learning, and the study will be goal-
directed which can become habitual later. For example, one intervention
of designing IDC-based learning activity was called Modeled Sustained
Silent Reading (MSSR) (Chan et al. 2018; Wong et al. 2020). MSSR was
aimed to help students to form reading habit. In MSSR, students
repeatedly exposed to “modeled” and “silent” environment. The element
of “modeled” and “silent” serve as context cues of the reading behaviors.

Another cue could be the educator himself/herself. Teachers can be the

role model of students as an interest-driven creator. Previous research
on mirror neurons show that observing other people’s behaviors may
facilitate unintentional and non-conscious mimic behaviors (Rizzolatti et
al. 1996). The finding suggests that students should be situated in a
learning environment with good behaviors. In classrooms, teachers
should become the role models so that students can mimic routines that
we want them to do. Besides, the teachers should also set up a norm
that is conducive to develop crowd habits in classrooms. As MSSR, to
help students form reading habit, their teacher also read on a routine
basis for long period of time (Chan et al. 2018; Wong et al. 2020).

It is helpful to view the process of habit development, especially for more

complex forms, as the interplay between one’s agency and situational
resources. That is, one’s will alone is not sufficient to develop and sustain
routine behaviors in a long term, unless situational opportunities and
resources are provided as affective and cognitive support. Situational
resources act as triggers in a cuing environment. For instance, the
design of an immersive simulation in classrooms (Lui and Slotta 2014)
demonstrates the possibility of using technology as a trigger for
collaborative inquiry activities. The large public display on the classroom
walls provides a situational cue where students can easily monitor the
collection of ideas and the current status of the community knowledge.
When entering the room with the situation cue, the students are engaged
in actions where they can easily check and monitor ideas. Further, the
immersive simulation on the large display may be able to trigger routine
behaviors for students to check what questions are posted and to
contribute ideas for collective knowledge advancement.

When we shift our focus of habit formation from the inside of one’s
mental activity to the interplay between individuals and environmental
cues, designing and embedding triggers in environments become a
central issue. The criticality of environmental cues in habit development
suggests the need to design tools and platforms that effectively provide
relevant triggers. With that, we can explore how the recent development
of emerging technologies can help provide effective and meaningful
triggers to students. For instance, the recent use of wearable
technologies has demonstrated the potential of detecting, capturing, and
analyzing data generated by individuals with a wearable device. Data is
seamlessly collected in an unconscious manner, hence reducing one’s
cognitive load of tracking and monitoring. Data from such wearable
devices can prompt individuals to evaluate their performance and in
some cases can provide motivational triggers to alter certain habitual
behaviors. Such applications for raising self-evaluation and self-
regulation have been proposed mainly in the field of healthcare systems,
including the visualization of eating habits and the sensor-based system
to monitor dietary habits (Faudot et al. 2010; Shuzo et al. 2010).

However, the application of such wearable and data-based technologies

for educational purposes is still in its infancy. Perhaps, learning analytics
is the most actively researched area that concerns with the use of the
vast amount of data for enhancing teaching and learning (Siemens
2013). Considering that many online crowd-based learning platforms
leave a vast amount of learner’s habitual data such as reading, writing,
and study patterns, such data can be automatically detected and made
meaningful to users as motivational triggers to reinforce positive habits or
to develop new habits.

Get students engaged in the behavior on a routine basis (do the

same thing at the same time every day or on a regular basis)

It is essential for students to practice the new habit regularly until it

becomes a routine in their life. Postponement or interruption should be
avoided because it weakens the habit formation. The routine schedules
in schools provide such a possibility as educators can get students
engage in knowledge creation work in a fixed time slot. For example, in
MSSR, when students go to the classroom in the early morning of every
day, the same silent classroom, same time, and the teacher and other
classmates who are reading books form the cuing environment for
forming the reading habit. The students have been reading on a routine
basis for long period of time.

The Fostering a Community of Learners (FCL) (Brown 1992) is a classic

example of classroom implementation where students were able to
develop a habit of sharing their ideas and interest horizontally in a
classroom and also vertically across different grades (Collins et al. 2004).
FCL employed a dramatically different structure where students are
engaged in crosstalk and reciprocal teaching to discuss across different
topics, to work in different groups, and to co-teach each other for
understanding. Such built-in activities and structures influenced the
emergence of a classroom culture where students were able to freely
share ideas and ask questions. This culture is a huge deviation from the
traditional classroom culture where individual students often engage in
fixed activities. What makes FCL successful is the fact that the routine
activities of sharing and discussing ideas function not as simply
procedural activities, but were operated as a system with the
interdependent activities that the underlying objectives are articulated
(Bielaczyc and Collins 1999). That is, both teachers and students as
community members were aware of why they are engaged in certain
procedures, thereby creating the shared understanding about their
actions.

There has been increasing evidence that the automaticity of habitual

behaviors is not the simple repeated coupling of stimulus and response,
but the complex interaction between internal and external forces (Lee
2014). Most of existing technology-integrated interventions and
applications tend to target health or life-style related behaviors such as
brushing teeth, changing food consumptions, and weight loss.
Successful interventions specifically targeting learning habits are scarce.
Unlike more reflexive motor habits, learning-related habits are to some
extent driven by goal-directed automatic behaviors. Hence, the process
from its formation to automation is governed by the interaction of multiple
factors including emotion, motivation, intention, social pressure, and
environmental configurations. This fact implies that simply changing a
part of one’s routine is unlikely to be successful if the external situations
and social influences remain unchanged.
Indeed, learning-related habits are not easy to form or change. The
existing research on learning volition may provide insights into
unpacking the complex process of habit changes. Learning volition
research suggests that even highly-motivated students often lose their
motivation for learning due to the lack of volition. In general, the volition
control for a goal pursuit follows three stages, namely goal-setting, goal
striving, and goal attainment (Kim and Bennekin 2013). Here,
motivational factors play critical roles in the initial stage of goal setting,
while volition is critical for goal striving. The volition theory implies that
simply presenting routine feedback for self-monitoring via digital
solutions alone does not necessary guarantee the formation of good
habits or the cessation of undesirable habits. However, it appears that
the design of some digitalized self-monitoring applications aiming to
affect habitual behaviors is based on the naive assumption that simply
providing users with routine feedback is likely to increase their self-
awareness on habitual behaviors. On the contrary, some digitalized
feedback solutions (e.g., emails, SMS messages) are easy to ignore and
be forgettable; hence, it is unlikely to create sustainable habit changes.

However, digital solutions to change habitual behaviors in daily routines

necessitate the in-depth understanding about the nature of rituals and
norms in schools and home, where routines are operated in rather
different ways. First, schools as social institutions have several types of
rituals to reward or inhibit certain behaviors. Bernstein (1975) in his
classic work on institutionalizing codes, class hierarchy and membership
suggests that schools have “differentiating rituals” to reward students
who conform to school norms and values (e.g., award ceremony), and
“integrating rituals” to show a collective identification with the school
(e.g., pep rallies, sports events). Embedding technology-integrated
solutions that fit well into such existing rituals in schools is likely to be
more successful than those that require disruptions and alterations in
existing rituals. The school-based intervention research by Poole et al.
(2011) also supports the importance of congruency between habit
changing attempts and school rituals in that one of the success factors of
school-based interventions is to support teachers in making space for
digital solutions to be used in typical school days and routines.

Next, routines at home operate differently in that they are heavily

influenced by the cultural beliefs and practices of parents. The cultural
comparison study on preschool children’s home routines reveals that the
Asian children spent more time on pre-academic activities and visiting
the library than the Euro-American students, who spent more time on
household chores and reading at bedtime (Parmar et al. 2004). Such
different patterns of daily activities may be an indication of different
norms and values of Asian parents. While it is challenging to change
such epistemic and cultural beliefs, one potentially promising solution to
change routines at home is to utilize everyday objects as a catalyst to
disrupt or change behaviors. Interventions that require a great deal of
adoption and changes at the initial change is unlikely successful.
Everyday objects (e.g., cups) already embedded in daily routines can
function as an effective catalyst for affecting habitual behaviors (Kao and
Schmandt 2014). Eventually, learning habits can be formed,
strengthened, and sustained through the close linking of routines
between home and school, through the constant availability of support
systems whether they are mediated by human, technology, or both.
Hence, parental involvement in the habit loop is essential, especially in
early years of student development. For example, in an intervention
called robotics program in one Singapore Primary school, besides of
routine activities in school, students also made robots at home during
school holiday time for sustaining their habit.
Reinforce students’ satisfaction

The sense of satisfaction can help students engage in new behaviors in

the habit loop. If students are satisfied by the experience of a new
routine, they typically attempt to facilitate behavioral changes, and vice
versa. Specifically, we consider that the satisfaction of the habit loop will
increase the strength of the habit formation, whereas low satisfaction will
gradually weaken it. Satisfaction may be boosted by reinforcing un-
existing wanted habits, or disrupting existing unwanted habits.
Regarding the former, the satisfaction of habit loop can potentially help
students form new good habits, such as inculcating the reading habit
(Asraf and Ahmad 2003) or becoming an amateur astronomy (Azevedo
2013); regarding the latter, satisfaction can also help students break old
“not-so-good” habits, such as weight loss (Finch et al. 2005) and
smoking cessation (Baldwin et al. 2006). That is, the satisfaction of habit
loop can apply a habit formation approach in designing behavior change
interventions.

The key to students’ satisfaction is to create successful learning

experience as often as possible. Fortunately, educators and researchers
have already provided several feasible ways of doing so. Generally
speaking, successful learning experience can be achieved by cognitive
and affective scaffolding. Cognitive scaffolding may support students to
complete difficult learning tasks, such as questioning, providing hints,
explaining, coaching, positive feedback, and modeling (see van de Pol et
al. 2010), while affective scaffolding may encourage students to finish
tasks and prevent possible negative emotions, such as anonymity
(Cornelius et al. 2011) or information hiding (Cheng et al. 2009). In
particular, teachers should provide low-ability students with additional
assistance, so that students can acquire the satisfaction in the habit loop
of interest-driven creation. For example, in MSSR, each time after
reading, students learned something new, and, as a result, they had a
sense of achievement and satisfaction. As time goes on, reading
becomes the hobby for some students MSSR (Chan et al. 2018; Wong
et al. 2020).

Building good habit is important and fundamental for education, be it in

school or out of school. It will have in-depth impact on student’s lifelong
learning and will nurture them as an interest-driven creator. There are so
many intervention projects in schools which use innovations to transform
students learning experiences. However, many of these interventions’
impact on school practices are limited. More research is needed in
addressing the fundamental issues on education. Nurturing good habit is
one of them.

Case studies

In this section, we examine the details of its habit loop design. One
typical example of designing IDC-based learning activity is MSSR (Chan
et al. 2018; Wong et al. 2020). MSSR instills the habit of reading in
students with the hope that they will ultimately become lifelong readers.
In MSSR, the cuing environment was silent classroom; the routine was
that students and the teacher read in the early morning; and the harmony
was that students’ positive psychological feelings after reading—the
routine of the established habit.

Individual teachers in Taiwan observed that when they practice MSSR,

their students were more calm in their behavior than before. One
elementary school principal reported that their students were less
worried in campus after practicing MSSR.Footnote 1 Perhaps, this
indicates that habit of interest-driven reading enables students to be
more harmonious with their social and physical environments around.
From the perspective of interest, if a student who has no reading
experience before finds a book with surprising information or character
identification that draws the student attention to read, we can say that the
student’s situational interest is sparked by this first experience. This
interest may or may not last over time. However, being a scheduled
routine in school, MSSR provides opportunities for students to develop
their reading interest progressively from situational interest to individual
interest (or hobby), and the student values the opportunity to reengage
the reading experience again and opt to pursue such opportunity. Such
interest development, in turn, will speed up the formation of reading
habit.

From the perspective of creation, a reading habit is the foundation for

acquiring knowledge in the world. This is also the preparing process of
creating new knowledge because creation needs to combine features of
existing models, knowledge, and concepts. Thus, every lifelong learner
must be a lifelong reader. Incubating the habit of reading should start
early in schools.

Another example is the Singapore Primary school’s robotics program

mentioned before. A group of selected students participates in the
program every Monday afternoon in a special classroom with various
robotic parts. The students signed up for the activities based on their
interest. Every Monday afternoon during school term, guided by the
same group of teachers, the students engage in making (programming,
building) robots. Over time, they form the habit of creating robots. As a
consequence, they even make robots at home. The same time, venue,
and teachers serve as the cuing environment for triggering their making
behaviors. The students make robots on a routine basis and enjoy the
making activities very much. After the making activities, the students
have a great sense of achievement once their robots can move and
compete with other robots.

In summary, habits of interest-driven creation are automatic behaviors,

which respond to environmental cues, develop through repetition of
creation behavior in consistent contexts, and reinforce a learner’s
harmony. In short, to create a habit, a learner needs to repeat the
behavior in the same situation. Hence, we can adopt that the habit loop
may provide a mechanism for establishing new behaviors, and learning
habit formation is a desired outcome for many interventions.

Issues in habit formation and future research

Can habit formation be cultivated by educators? Obviously, the answer is

yes. As discussed earlier, the mental processes and dispositions for
habit can be taught and practiced, so that they become habitual ways of
working towards thoughtful, purposeful, self-regulated actions in facing
the challenges of life. Having said this, there are many issues that remain
to be addressed when cultivating students’ habit in interest-driven
creation.

The first issue is time. The widely touted theory, highlighted in a 1993
psychology paper and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers
(Gladwell 2008), says that anyone can master a skill with 10,000 h of
practice. One can say that habit formation is the basis for becoming an
expert in a particular area. If we are able to get students accumulate
considerable amount of time on a regular basis if not daily, students are
more likely to form a habit and become an expert in the area later.
However, it is not realistic to expect students to be an expert in too many
areas because forming habits takes time, but students’ time is not
unlimitedly as they need to do other activities as well. Therefore,
educators and researchers need to prioritize the learning habits we
would like students to form. Do we need to take step-by-step
approaches to address more fundamental learning habit (e.g., reading)
first? If yes, what are those more fundamental and important learning
habits that we want students to form so that they can be successful in
learning?

The second issue is the satisfaction (reward) achieved out of the new
learning practices. As many learning habit we would like the students to
form may not have an immediate impact on students’ learning measured
by traditional exams, how do we make students more satisfied through
the new learning experiences? More research is needed in this area to
reinforce the students’ satisfaction from the new learning experiences.

The third issue is the relationship between interest and habit in IDC
theory. We need to tap on students’ interest in cultivating their learning
habit. If we provide a cuing environment for students’ habit formation, is
this in alignment with their interest? What if students do not have this
interest at the beginning? Or can they develop interest after we introduce
them the new learning practices?

The fourth issue is the balance of educator’s effort and students’ effort in
habit formation. The intrinsic motivation is important for habit formation.
Educators and parents can provide cuing environments and provide
scaffolds and support. How much scaffold and support are needed?
How to increase students’ intrinsic motivation for the habit formation?

Last but not least, for cultivating students’ interest-driven creation habits,
do educators, parents, or researchers, as students’ learning designers,
need to form habit in interest-driven creation or design learning
environments for cultivating and developing interest-driven creators? If
yes how?

We may not have immediate answers for all these questions and there
could be more issues to be addressed. More research and discussions
are needed in exploring these under-explored areas. We raise the
questions here to stimulate more in-depth discussions among
educators, parents, researchers, and policy makers.

Conclusion

This paper is the continuation of two earlier papers in this thematic series
that focused on two anchored concepts of IDC theory—interest and
creation. To recap, in the first anchored concept, interest, we talked
about how to put interest as the first design consideration. That is,
students must learn with interest or learning is interest-driven (Wong et
al. 2020). Since the concept interest comprised three components—
curiosity, flow, and meaningfulness—this means that students must
learn curiously, immersively, or meaningfully. Learning with interest is
important because students will spend more time and energy and enjoy
it. In the second anchored concept, creation, we talked about how we
treat a learning activity as a creation activity of knowledge or skills (Chan
et al. 2019). Thus, an interest-driven learning activity is also regarded as
an interest-driven creation activity. Since the concept creation comprised
three components—imitating, combining, and staging—thus, an
interest-driven creation activity also comprised interest-driven imitation,
interest-driven combination, and interest-driven staging.

In the third and final anchored concept, habit, as discussed in this paper,
we posit that if students learn with interest habitually (as when following a
school timetable that regulates daily routines), and their learning process
emulates the creation process, then students will become creators,
hopefully, lifelong interest-driven creators (Chan et al. 2018). Since the
creation process is composed of imitating, combining, and staging sub-
processes, when talking about nurturing students’ habits of interest-
 driven creation, we are also talking about nurturing habits of interest-
driven imitating, interest-driven combining, and interest-driven staging. It
is important to note that when habit of interest-driven creation is formed,
creation per se then becomes students’ individual interest of hobby. The
students also then become self-pursuit creators. Furthermore, repeating
such interest-driven creation in daily routines, students experience
harmony: positive feelings such as fulfillment, satisfaction, achievement,
and inner peace.

To conclude, we hope that IDC theory will serve its purpose well by
providing a valid basis for studying and understanding the cultivation of
interest in learning, creation, and problem solving complex tasks and
development of habitual interest-driven creators. We, as researchers
ourselves, will endeavor to continue using this theory to guide our
research to resolve the ongoing tensions between academic
performance and interest in learning among Asian schools. We extend
our invitation to all scholars across various disciplines and countries to
help us in this endeavor to find ways that can lead to better future
learning.

Availability of data and materials

Not applicable. This is a conceptual paper without empirical data

collected.

Notes

1. Individual school teachers who took the MSSR training course

mentioned their observations of the change of their student behavior
after practicing MSSR in 2013. In the same course, as an invited
speaker, Principal L. L. Chen of Reimei Elementary School presented
with statistical result the obvious drop of number of cases that students
got wounded in campus after practicing MSSR.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

1. National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University,

Singapore, Singapore

Wenli Chen, Lung Hsiang Wong, Chee Kit Looi & Zhongling Pi

2. National Central University, Taoyuan, Taiwan

Tak Wai Chan

3. National Taipei University of Nursing and Health Sciences, Taipei,

Taiwan

Calvin C. Y. Liao

4. Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China

Hercy N. H. Cheng
5. Universiti Putra Malaysia, Seri Kembangan, Malaysia

Su Luan Wong

6. Charles Darwin University, Casuarina, Australia

Jon Mason

7. Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea

Hyo-Jeong So

8. Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India

Sahana Murthy

9. East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

Xiaoqing Gu

Authors

1. Wenli Chen
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2. Tak Wai Chan

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3. Lung Hsiang Wong

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4. Chee Kit Looi

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5. Calvin C. Y. Liao
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6. Hercy N. H. Cheng
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7. Su Luan Wong
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8. Jon Mason
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9. Hyo-Jeong So
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10. Sahana Murthy

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11. Xiaoqing Gu
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12. Zhongling Pi
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Contributions

WC was the main author of the paper who conducted literature review,
derived the key framework, and wrote the majority part of the paper. WC
is the corresponding author of this paper. TWC was the proposer of the
IDC theory and wrote the case study on MSSR in the paper. LHW and
CKL were the anchor authors of the interest loop paper and the overall
research agenda paper of IDC respectively, which, together with this
manuscript and the creation loop paper spearheaded by TWC,
constitute the series of IDC papers with intertwining concepts. We are
making references to the concepts presented in each other’s paper. CL
and HC were the early co-developers of the habit loop process which
provided the skeleton of the framework that WC developed, and were
involved in tightening up the final version of this paper. SLW, JM, HJS,
SM, and XG offered crucial ideas for us in developing paper and assisted
us in refining the paper. ZP did revisions on the manuscript based on the
reviewers’ comments. The authors read and approved the final
manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wenli Chen.

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Chen, W., Chan, T.W., Wong, L.H. et al. IDC theory: habit and the habit
loop. RPTEL 15, 10 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41039-020-00127-7

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Received: 28 August 2019

Accepted: 18 February 2020

Published: 14 May 2020

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41039-020-00127-7

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