Testing a Utility Value Intervention in Two-Year Colleges

• In Event: 30.032 - Opening the File Drawer for Innovation in Task Value Intervention

Abstract

Objective
We tested a utility-value intervention in a new context: two-year colleges. Surprisingly, we did not replicate well-established effects seen in high schools and 4-year institutions. We explore possible explanations for this failure to replicate prior findings.

Theoretical Perspective
Based in Eccles’ expectancy-value model (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002), utility value (UV) interventions have students write about the personal relevance of course topics. These interventions work best for students who doubt their competence and for those with a history of poor performance (Harackiewicz et al., 2016; Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009). However, questions remain about how to implement this intervention in different educational contexts, such as 2-year colleges. Given the diversity of students’ academic backgrounds, it may be necessary to adapt the typical UV writing assignment with additional scaffolding. In this study we compare two different ways of scaffolding the UV intervention to help students find value in their coursework.

Method
We implemented the UV intervention in a double-blind experiment in introductory courses across six 2-year college campuses (N=415), using methods based on the successful Harackiewicz et al. (2016) study. Utilizing a 3-cell design, we tested two ways of scaffolding the UV intervention, against a control assignment. In the student-framed condition, UV examples were written in the voice of former students and in the instructor-framed condition, the same examples were in the voice of the instructor. We hypothesized that the framing of the intervention would have differential effects for students who struggle in the course.

Results
We found that the student-framed UV intervention made the course more interesting for students doing well in the course compared to the instructor-framed UV intervention. However, contrary to previous research, we found that struggling students became less interested and perceived less utility value in UV conditions, compared to the control. Our data suggest that the UV interventions may have been somewhat threatening for students who were struggling with the material, especially when confronted with strong examples generated by other students. When we examined the writing style and content of the essays, we found that all students were articulating more value and writing more informally in the UV conditions, as intended; however, struggling students did not benefit from this type of writing. We discovered that the essays were more focused on UV than scientific content than in previous research, and we suspect that scientific content is an important factor that contributes to intervention efficacy.

Significance
This failure to replicate has provided several important lessons about implementing UV interventions. First, it is important to understand contextual differences before implementing the intervention on a large scale. Second, students need to have a basic understanding of the material to benefit from the intervention. Our results suggest that the scientific content component of the UV intervention is more critical than the personal value component, and this raises important questions for future research. It is possible that the UV intervention might have positive effects in the 2-year context if it were implemented after students more fully developed their content knowledge.

Authors

• Elizabeth Ann Canning, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Stacy J. Priniski, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Judith Harackiewicz, University of Wisconsin