Understanding Contextual Effects of Utility-Value Interventions

• In Event: 25.024 - Synergies in Studies of Motivation and Learning: An Interactive Workshop

Abstract

Utility value writing interventions have been designed to help students find the personal relevance and value of course material in order to promote student engagement and performance. This type of intervention has been shown to work best for students with low actual and perceived performance, yet most of the studies to date have been conducted with students enrolled at selective 4-year research universities. Less is known about contextual effects of the intervention, particularly in diverse contexts, such as 2-year colleges, where students enter the course with different levels of engagement and educational backgrounds. In classroom contexts where students have weak backgrounds in the subject matter, students may have more concerns about self-efficacy (“Can I learn this?”), whereas in contexts where students have strong backgrounds in the subject matter, students may have more concerns about value (“Why should I learn this?”). Using Chapter 3 as a conceptual framework, we discuss how self-efficacy beliefs may be one route to disentangling disparate findings of the utility value intervention across educational contexts.

We also explore student engagement as a mechanism for the success of the intervention for students across different contexts. Previous research in 4-year universities has shown that when the intervention was effective, it promoted performance through students’ engagement with the writing assignment (i.e., essay length and pronoun usage). As students became engrossed in the utility value assignment, they wrote longer essays and referenced themselves more, compared to a control assignment. When the intervention was tested in 2-year colleges, students did not engage with the utility value writing assignment in the same way, revealing why the intervention may have been ineffective in this context. Building on Chapter 27, which highlights the challenge of measuring student engagement, we propose linguistic text analysis as an additional method for capturing student engagement with a particular assignment. We discuss how measuring engagement with the utility value writing assignment has revealed pathways through which the intervention may have worked in some contexts, but not others.

Authors

• Elizabeth Ann Canning, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Judith Harackiewicz, University of Wisconsin