Reducing Achievement Gaps With a Utility-Value Intervention in Community Colleges

• In Event: 58.072 - Developments in Expectancy Value Intervention Research

Abstract

Converging evidence from research based in Eccles and colleagues’ expectancy-value theory and goal congruity theory suggests that utility-value interventions designed to help students connect their coursework to their helping-oriented goals have the potential to close achievement gaps for underrepresented students. We tested two versions of the utility-value intervention —a standard version in which students connect the course material to their own lives, and a helping-oriented version in which students also connect course material to making a contribution to society—in seven small community colleges (N = 370). Both first-generation college students and underrepresented minority students received higher course grades in the utility-value conditions. There did not appear to be any benefit of adding a helping focus to the intervention.

Authors

• Stacy J. Priniski, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Elizabeth Ann Canning, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Yoi Tibbetts, University of Virginia

• Cameron Hecht, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Judith Harackiewicz, University of Wisconsin

• Sara Goldrick-Rab, Temple University