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Category: Project

Description: Students are more likely to succeed in courses they find valuable (Eccles et al., 1983; Wigfield, Rosenzweig, & Eccles, 2017). However, many students, especially those from backgrounds typically underrepresented in education, often struggle to find value in STEM courses (Lewis & Connell (2005). One possible explanation for this is that many students do not have the chance to explore how course material may be personally relevant to them. Utility-value interventions help address this major issue by scaffolding students to identify their own personally meaningful connections between their classes and their real lives (Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009). Although numerous studies have shown the potential for utility-value interventions to increase student performance and motivation (Hulleman et al., 2009; Harackiewicz, Canning, Tibbetts, Prinski, & Hyde, 2016; Hulleman, Godes, Hendricks, & Harackiewicz, 2010; Gaspard et al., 2015), little is known about the active ingredients that make these interventions most effective. This problem is a particularly important one to solve given that recent work has pointed to the fact that the effectiveness of these interventions depends on strong student engagement with the intervention materials (Hulleman et al., in prep). Recent work conducted with Character Lab has sought to explore this issue by developing and testing new intervention designs that support student engagement in different ways. Building on previous work by Hanna Gaspard and colleagues (2015), researchers developed an intervention in which high school participants read quotes from previous students about how they have used math in their real lives, and then were asked to rate how relevant they found the quotes and discuss how the quotes could be improved for future students. Findings suggest that this intervention not only decreased math anxiety (b*=-0.384, p=.025) and increased student perceptions of math utility value (b*=.522, p=.002)--controlling for student demographics, prior achievement, and pre-intervention measures of these variables--but also significantly increased the math GPA of students who received free/reduced price lunch (b*=6.714, p=.031). The current study seeks to replicate these findings with a new population, as well as further investigate the psychological and intervention mechanisms essential to this study's success. It capitalizes and extends on prior work by exploring effective ways to prepare high school students to think about how math might help them in the current or future lives. Through identifying methods that support student engagement in the intervention, researchers can develop utility-value interventions that better support student motivation and achievement.