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Motivation
How to Foster a Sense of Value in Schoolwork
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.
Posted June 30, 2016
By Amanda Durik, guest contributor
Most students have wondered at one time or another whether the material they are learning in school will ever be useful to them. Before you try making that important case, research indicates you must carefully consider the individual student.
Research into this area surrounds the idea of task-utility value, or the extent to which a task is believed to be useful for achieving either short- or long-term goals (Eccles et al., 1983).
Tasks that are seen as useful are connected to personal goals. For example, a high school student who wants to go into a medical career is likely to perceive a biology course as useful and perhaps essential to becoming a doctor.
It makes sense that students are more likely to choose, persist in, and excel in activities that are perceived as being more (versus less) useful for accomplishing their goals.
That said, researchers don’t merely want to understand this issue, they also want to intervene, to help students understand the value of schoolwork. This is especially important as a student progresses in school, given that students tend to perceive less value in their academic work as they get older (Jacobs et al. 2003).
With this backdrop, it is not surprising that research has turned to the question of how to foster a sense of value in schoolwork, and interventions are being developed to do just that. But the picture is more complex than it might seem at first blush.
The Direct Approach: Just Tell Them It’s Useful
One obvious intervention is a direct approach: “Listen up, this is really useful for your career.”
But it is important to remember that students enter classes with their own beliefs about themselves. In particular, some students are more confident in their abilities to learn in a given environment, whereas others are less sure. Students’ beliefs about their own abilities can impact how they respond (Durik, Shechter, Noh, Rozek, & Harackiewicz, 2015).
When the utility is communicated as part of the instruction (as though the information is from the teacher), those with high confidence in their abilities benefit. Meanwhile, those who feel less confident actually report lower interest in the material than if they are not given utility information at all. In other words, a student who doubts his or her ability in biology may be turned off by the idea that biology is important for a career.
That said, recent research has followed up on this idea and found that the source of the utility information matters. Students overall (regardless of confidence level) reported more interest in learning materials if they received utility information from a source that they believed was a peer, compared with those who did not receive utility information (Gaspard et al., 2015). This research suggests that student-to-student communication about the usefulness of a subject might be more effective than teacher-to-student in some cases.
The Subtle Approach: Help Them Find Their Own Value
The other way researchers have tried to cultivate perceived utility in schoolwork is to encourage students to identify for themselves ways that the information is useful. In other words, rather than telling students how the schoolwork could be useful for them, they have to come up with their own reasons (Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009).
In this approach, students are asked to write an essay about how the schoolwork might be useful. It is up to the student to think about the material covered in a course, the goals, and how the two might merge. The effects of this method are encouraging, but again, the pattern is not simple.
Interestingly, this approach works best for those students who have lower confidence in their abilities. These students might not realize how useful biology material can be until they are asked to think about it. Doing so helps them open up to the possibilities (Canning & Harackiewicz, 2015).
Students with higher confidence may get less out of this approach because they tend to think about how schoolwork might be useful to them on their own, without prompting (Hulleman et al., 2010).
The Importance of Research in a Complex World
These results highlight important points about research related to helping students succeed in school.
First, basic research is important for understanding any complex problem, and coming up with practical solutions. Without careful research, it is possible that the interventions might have unintended (and negative) consequences. You wouldn’t want students to think that school is less useful after receiving an intervention.
Second, the world is a complex place. Any outcome we find is the result of how a person and a situation interact. What’s more, each student has different strengths and weaknesses.
Because of these complex interactions, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all intervention. Some students thrive under intervention A; others under intervention B. It is important to understand what students bring to the situation and what a given intervention does to predict student responses (Durik, Hulleman, & Harackiewicz, 2015).
Amanda Durik, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Northern Illinois University. She teaches courses in motivation, group dynamics, and research methods. Her research focuses on motivation in achievement situations, and the situational and individual factors that contribute to the development of both performance and interest.
References
Canning, E.A. & Harackiewicz, J.M. (2015). Teach it, don’t preach it: The differential effects of directly-communicated and self-generated utility-value information. Motivation Science, 1, 47-71. doi: 10.1037/mot0000015
Durik, A.M., Hulleman, C.S., & Harackiewicz, J.M. (2015). One size fits some: Instructional enhancements to promote interest. In K.A. Renninger & M. Nieswandt (Eds.), Interest, the self, and K-16 mathematics and science learning. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.
Durik, A.M., Shechter, O.G., Noh, M., Rozek, C.S., & Harackiewicz, J.M. (2015). What if I can’t? Success expectancies moderate the effects of utility value information on situational interest and performance. Motivation and Emotion, 39, 104-118. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11031-014-9419-0
Eccles, J., Adler, T.F., Futterman, R., Goff, S.B., Kaczala, C.M., Meece, J.L., & Midgley, C. (1983). Expectancies, values, and academic behaviors. In J.T. Spence (Ed.), Achievement and achievement motives: Psychological and sociological approaches (pp. 75–146). San Francisco: Freeman.
Gaspard, H., Dicke, A.L., Flunger, B., Brisson, B.M., Hafner, I., Nagengast, B., & Trautwein, U. (2015). Fostering adolescents’ value beliefs for mathematics with a relevance intervention in the classroom. Developmental Psychology, 51, 1226-40.
Hulleman, C.S., Godes, O., Hendricks, B.L., & Harackiewicz, J.M. (2010). Enhancing interest and performance with a utility value intervention. Journal of Educational Psychology, 102, 880-895. doi: 10.1037/a0019506
Hulleman, C.S., & Harackiewicz, J.M. (2009). Promoting interest and performance in high school science classes. Science, 326(1410), 1410-1412. doi: 10.1126/science.1177067
Jacobs, J. E., Lanza, S., Osgood, D. W., Eccles, J. S., & Wigfield, A. (2002). Changes in Children’s Self-Competence and Values: Gender and Domain Differences across Grades One through Twelve. Child Development, 73, 509-527
