Abstract

For centuries, educational stakeholders around the world have called for relevance in education. William James and John Dewey led philosophers and psychologists to examine the implications of relevance for student learning and motivation. They theorized that relevance was critical for comprehension of new information and for academic engagement. Beyond calls for educators to “make education relevant,” Dewey advocated for teachers to help students learn to make their own connections between academic lessons and their concerns or preoccupations, because he believed that such self-regulated relevance appraisal skills were fundamental to personal and social development both within and outside of schools. In recent years, motivation scientists have developed relevance interventions that ask students to write short essays in which they connect academic lessons to their lives. Experimental studies have found mixed results showing that these writing tasks can have positive, null, and even negative effects on academic outcomes, such as student achievement and motivation. Such findings have catalyzed efforts to theoretically clarify and empirically test the psychological mechanisms causing discrepant outcomes. Guided by Pintrich’s motivation science framework, this dissertation synthesized research findings and theoretical work from educational psychology and philosophy to build an empirical research program. In two manuscripts, the present dissertation proposed and tested the educational relevance appraisal (ERA) model to help explain mixed intervention effects in expectancy-value theory. According to the ERA model, (a) relevance writing prompts elicit cognitive appraisal processes through which students form relevance beliefs, and (b) those relevance beliefs directly affect achievement motivation. The first manuscript, Educational Relevance in the Motivation Sciences: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis, contributed to the growing body of theoretical literature exploring the meaning of relevance and its role in promoting the development of motivational beliefs, as defined in expectancy-value theory. Taking guidance from pragmatist philosophers, the synthesis presented in Manuscript 1 aligned current specialized conceptualizations of relevance more closely with widely-held interpretations, so that researchers can respond more directly to common calls for relevance from educational stakeholders, especially students. The prominent hypothesis that relevance is equivalent to task value beliefs was critiqued and shown to be logically inconsistent with common usage of the concept in educational psychology and society. In particular, it was shown that relevance most fundamentally reflects the comprehensibility of relationships between concepts, rather than their motivational implications. 15 recent hypotheses proposing explanations for incongruent relevance intervention effects were then interpreted in terms of the ERA model assumptions. The second manuscript, Educational Relevance Appraisals and Their Relations to Motivational Beliefs: Testing a Mediation Model of Relevance Intervention Effects reported findings from two studies at Freedom High School (pseudonym), a rural-fringe school that predominantly serves academically at-risk students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Both studies used structural equation modeling to analyze high school records and student survey data. The first study tested the ERA model during the last semester of the 2017-2018 academic year. Study 2 sought to replicate findings in support of the ERA model in the first semester of the 2018-2019 academic year. Evidence mostly corroborated ERA model assumptions; however, key tenets in the motivation sciences were not support. In Study 1, task value beliefs did not predict course grades, and in Study 2, they negatively predicted course grades. Also, the hypothesis that students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds would experience less relevance and motivation in school was not supported.