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Chen et al. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning
(2020) 15:10
https://doi.org/10.1186/s41039-020-00127-7

R E S E A R C H

Open Access

IDC theory: habit and the habit loop
Wenli Chen1*
Su Luan Wong5, Jon Mason6, Hyo-Jeong So7, Sahana Murthy8, Xiaoqing Gu9 and Zhongling Pi1

, Tak Wai Chan2, Lung Hsiang Wong1, Chee Kit Looi1, Calvin C. Y. Liao3, Hercy N. H. Cheng4,

Abstract

* Correspondence: Wenli.chen@nie.
edu.sg
1National Institute of Education,
Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore, Singapore
Full list of author information is
available at the end of the article

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.

Keywords: Interest-driven creator (IDC) theory, Learning habit, Habit loop

Introduction
Researchers, educators, and parents have long acknowledged the importance of culti-
vating 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 Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which
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Chen et al. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning (2020) 15:10

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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 suffi-
ciently 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:

(cid:1) Interest, which examined the first anchored concept of IDC emphasizing the

significance of promoting student learning through interest;

(cid:1) 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 cre-
ation—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 phi-
losophers, 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

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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: prob-
lems 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 consist-
ent 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 learn-
ing 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 impulsiv-
ity, 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 chil-
dren. They show how children can be taught, at home and at school, how to “habitu-
ate” 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 reason-
ing ability before taking decisions and testing conclusions, and others (Hertel and Bro-
zovich 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 es-
sence 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.

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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 alterna-
tives. 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
for coordinated action to be possible. Group
routinization contributes to predictability.

individuals

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 pat-
tern: 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 be-
tween habits and learning is widely recognized, there is much less research that investi-
gates 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 develop-
ment 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. Adapt-
ing James’ and subsequent Durhigg’s framework, we proposed a habit formation frame-
work 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.

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

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Fig. 1 The habit loop

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 appro-
priate 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). Fur-
thermore, 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’ pro-
cedural memory. For this reason, habits can be developed via providing a constant en-
vironment, 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 every-
day life.

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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 be-
comes 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 de-
pends 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 de-
pending on variations in the circumstances). Recurrent tasks are more amenable to the
formation of automated responses and the development of habits, whereas non-recur-
rent 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 investi-
gating 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 develop-
ment 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.

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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 be-
tween 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, develop-
ing a reading habit is also developing interest in reading. Once students have the inter-
est, 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 pro-
duce no lasting effect on students unless it is repeated regularly in daily learning acti-
vities 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 inter-
est refers to focused attention and the affective reaction triggered in the moment by

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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 mind-
set; in contrast, those who think intelligence is inherent and unchangeable exert less ef-
fort 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 sim-
ple 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 infor-
mation 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 rea-
soned activities for students; it could become a habitual routine behavior in a long