Closing Achievement Gaps in Undergraduate Biology and Chemistry Courses With Value Interventions

• In Event: Scaling Up Social Psychological Interventions to Address Achievement Gaps in Education

Abstract

Keeping students interested in college science courses is crucial to keeping them on track for careers in biomedical science. One way to develop interest in activities is to find meaning and value in those activities, and one type of task value that has proven to be a powerful predictor of interest and performance is utility value. Recent experimental research indicates that it is possible to promote perceived utility value with simple interventions that ask students to write about the relevance of course topics to their own life or to the life of a family member or close friend. These interventions work best for people who doubt their competence and for students with a history of poor performance. For example, Hulleman & Harackiewicz (2009) found that their utility value (UV) intervention raised interest and grades for 9th grade science students with low performance expectations, relative to students in a control group who wrote summaries of course topics. Hulleman et al. (2010) found that the same UV intervention promoted interest in an introductory psychology class for students who had performed poorly on early exams, relative to a control group.

Miyake et al. (2010) recently demonstrated that the values affirmation (VA) intervention could be used to close the achievement gap for women in a college physics class, and we believe that the VA and UV interventions can be used together to optimize motivation for minority students in college classes. Another minority group that should benefit from such interventions is first- generation college students – these students perform more poorly and have higher dropout rates than continuing-generation students (this effect is referred to as the social class achievement gap).

We have been conducting an experimental field test of both interventions in large-enrollment introductory biology (N=1200 students) and chemistry (N=2000 students) classes at the University of Wisconsin, to test the effectiveness of the UV and VA interventions in introductory biology and chemistry classes for threatened groups (underrepresented ethnic minority students, first-generation students, and women in chemistry, where there is a gender gap). We are testing the interventions separately and in combination to determine whether they work additively or synergistically to promote motivation and performance for threatened groups.

Our preliminary results suggest that the UV intervention was successful in reducing the gender gap in chemistry grades, but that the VA intervention, administered via an online course management system, was not effective in reducing any achievement gaps. In contrast, in the biology classes, where we have only tested VA interventions to date, the VA intervention, administered in laboratory sessions as in Miyake et al (2010), we found that the VA intervention reduced the achievement gap for first-generation students by 49%. Our preliminary results indicate that these interventions can indeed be scaled up to large enrollment science classes, but that we need to attend to how these interventions are implemented in specific social contexts to maximize their effectiveness.

Authors

• Judith Harackiewicz, University of Wisconsin

• Elizabeth Ann Canning, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Yoi Tibbetts, University of Wisconsin

• Janet S. Hyde, University of Wisconsin - Madison