Choose Your Own Intervention: Using Choice to Enhance the Effectiveness of a Utility-Value Intervention

Personal choice shields against affective influences on effort in a "do your best" task: Effects on cardiac response

This experiment (N = 113) tested whether personal choice vs. external assignment of task characteristics moderates the effect of incidental affective stimulation on effort-related cardiovascular response in a "do your best" task context. When participants could choose themselves the color of the stimuli (i.e., a series of letters to be recalled) used in a memory task, we expected high task commitment and willingness to mobilize resources, strong action shielding, and thus low receptivity for incidental affective influences. By contrast, when the color was externally assigned, we expected low willingness to mobilize resources, weak action shielding, and thus strong affective influences on effort. As predicted, participants in the assigned color condition showed stronger cardiac pre-ejection period reactivity during task execution when exposed to sad music than when exposed to happy music. These music effects did not appear among participants who could personally choose the color. Here, effort was high independently of the happy or sad background music. The present study demonstrates the moderating effect of personal choice on resource mobilization in a task of unfixed difficulty with happy and sad background music as incidental affective influence.

Identifying the psychological mechanisms of utility-value activities to inform educational research and practice

BACKGROUND

Utility-value interventions have been shown to promote students' achievement and motivation in mathematics through encouraging them to identify connections between course content and their real lives. To extend the benefits of these interventions, additional research is necessary to test their efficacy in diverse high school contexts, as well as investigate the psychological mechanisms through which they benefit students.

AIMS

To inform efforts within broader learning contexts to develop activities and messages based on utility-value interventions that effectively target the psychological mechanisms that support student learning.

SAMPLES

Study 1 (N = 375) and Study 2 (N = 2894) include racially and socioeconomically diverse samples of students enrolled in mathematics courses across four high schools in the United States.

METHODS

We conducted two randomized field experiments to test the effects of brief utility-value activities on students' motivation. Using multi-level path analyses, we then investigated the mechanisms through which utility-value activities bolster students' interest and achievement in mathematics.

RESULTS

In pre-registered analyses, we found that the utility-value activities promoted students' perceived value of mathematics, as well as their novel engagement and sense of social identity congruence with mathematics. In turn, these outcomes mediated the indirect effects of the activities on students' grades and interest in mathematics.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results underscore the potential of utility-value activities to promote students' success. Based on our mediation findings, we also provide a roadmap for how learning contexts can develop activities and messages that effectively target key processes to advance student success.

Why do I teach? Teachers' instrumental and prosocial motivation predict teaching quality across East and West

BACKGROUND

Individuals pursue teaching careers for numerous reasons, such as for instrumental or prosocial purposes.

AIMS

This study examined the personal (instrumental motivation) and social (prosocial motivation) utility of teaching as predictors of teaching quality in terms of clarity of instruction, classroom management, and cognitive activation.

SAMPLE

We used data from the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018, which included 50,595 teachers from 1252 schools in 10 countries and regions.

METHODS

We performed a series of regression analyses to test a model of instrumental and prosocial motivation to predict three indicators of teaching quality (clarity of instruction, classroom management, and cognitive activation) while controlling for demographic characteristics (age, sex, educational level, and teaching experience). We examined this model in countries and regions from Eastern (Japan, Korea, Singapore, Shanghai and Taipei) and Western (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States of America) cultures.

RESULTS

Results demonstrated that instrumental motivation predicted clarity of instruction in the East and classroom management in both the East and West; prosocial motivation, however, was a more consistent predictor of all indicators of teaching quality, except classroom management in the West, across cultures.

CONCLUSION

Teachers' prosocial motivation to benefit others and contribute to society must be considered to understand teaching quality across various cultural contexts. Implications for theory, practice and policy are discussed.

Study satisfaction among university students during the COVID-19 pandemic: Longitudinal development and personal-contextual predictors

The COVID-19 pandemic challenges the well-being and academic success of many students. Yet, little is known about students' study satisfaction during the COVID-19 pandemic, a multilayered construct which accounts for students' subjective cognitive well-being and academic success. Besides, previous studies on study satisfaction are mostly cross-sectional and hardly consider the distinct subdimensions of this construct. Therefore, our main goal in this study was to shed light on the understudied development of the subdimensions of study satisfaction (i.e., satisfaction with study content, conditions of studying, and coping with study-related stress) in two semesters amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, we examined how particular personal (i.e., gender, age, GPA, intrinsic motivation, motivational cost, and academic procrastination) and contextual (i.e., loneliness) factors are related to these subdimensions. We conducted two panel studies with convenience and purposeful samples of university students in Germany (N study1 = 837; N study2 = 719). Participants responded online to questions on each of the subdimensions of study satisfaction at the beginning, middle, and end of each semester but responded to measures of personal and contextual factors only at the beginning of each semester. In both studies, manifest growth curve models indicated a decrease in all subdimensions of study satisfaction as the semester progressed. Generally, gender (male) and intrinsic motivation were positive predictors but age (younger students), motivational cost, and loneliness were negative predictors of different subdimensions of study satisfaction - particularly satisfaction with study content. Overall, motivational costs and loneliness were the most consistent predictors of all subdimensions of study satisfaction across both studies. Our findings provide support for the understanding that study satisfaction could diminish in the face of challenging situations such as in this pandemic. The present study also highlights certain personal and contextual factors that relate to study satisfaction and calls for intensive research into the multidimensional construct of study satisfaction.

Methods for activating professional self-determination of a person at the stage of pre-professional development: the experience of foreign countries

The article presents an overview of modern international studies of the problem of activation of professional self-determination of high school students. The results of the study conducted by Chinese scientists aimed at studying cognitive and affective self-esteem and their role in building the educational and professional path of high school students are presented. The effectiveness of applying relevant interventions in the classroom to enhance the professional interest of high school students in STEM professions, a model that combines natural sciences and engineering subjects into a single system, is analyzed in comparison to the study conducted in Germany. Mentoring is considered as a mechanism for professional self-determination in high school, contributing, in the opinion of Swedish scientists, to solving the problem of a shortage of specialists in the labor market. The article gives a comparative analysis of the systems of academic training and initial vocational education, which provides graduates with a smooth transition to the modern labor market. The experience of Denmark is analyzed, which is an institutional context for the study of inequality associated with vocational education.

OUP accepted manuscript

What motivates faculty teaching gateway courses to consider adopting an evidence-based classroom intervention? In this nationally representative study of biology faculty members in the United States (N = 422), we used expectancy–value–cost theory to understand three convergent motivational processes the faculty members’ underlying intentions to adopt an exemplar evidence-based classroom intervention: the utility value intervention (UVI). Although the faculty members perceived the intervention as valuable, self-reported intentions to implement it were degraded by concerns about costs and lower expectancies for successful implementation. Structural equation modeling revealed that the faculty members reporting lower intentions to adopt it tended to be White and to identify as male and had many years of teaching or were from a more research-focused university. These personal, departmental, and institutional factors mapped onto value, expectancies, and cost perceptions uniquely, showing that each process was a necessary but insufficient way to inspire intentions to adopt the UVI. Our findings suggest multifaceted, context-responsive appeals to support faculty member motivation to scale up adoption of evidence-based classroom interventions.

Control-Value Theory of Achievement Emotions and Its Relevance to School Psychology

The control-value theory (CVT) of achievement emotions is a well-established theoretical framework which delineates the predictive relationships among distal and proximal antecedents, academic emotions, and student engagement and achievement. Although most research anchored in CVT is conducted by educational psychologists, the theory is arguably applicable to the field of school psychology. In this article, we first provide a brief overview of the theory, with a specific focus on the proximal antecedents (i.e., cognitive appraisals), as well as academic emotions and performance. Given that school psychologists are often consulted with strategies regarding students’ emotional challenges exhibited in the classroom, we then discuss empirical evidence of control- and value-based interventions (e.g., attributional retraining, utility-value), both of which can be posited to address the cognitive appraisals of achievement emotions. Lastly, we discuss the implications of CVT and control- and value-based interventions to school psychologists’ work.

Brief, Written Reflections Improve Interest of Introductory Animal Science Undergraduates

In addition to stimulating interest through experiential means, educators can support interest development through structured reflection. Our randomized controlled intervention study assessed the effectiveness of 10-minute written utility-value reflections designed to enhance the interest of introductory animal science students. During the Spring 2019 semester, we randomly assigned participating students into two blocks, utility-value reflection (n = 39) and control (n = 34), at the beginning of the course. In week 6 during the 16-week semester, students completed corresponding tasks: either written reflections on the personal value of course laboratory material or a control picture-summarization task. Results showed that the utility-value reflection intervention tended to improve situational interest and was most effective for students with low pretest individual interest. Neither the intervention nor the interest variable predicted course performance. In utility-value reflection responses, we catalogued themes aligned with a range of task-value components beyond utility-value. Our results reinforce previous work indicating that utility-value reflections support low individual interest students in developing academic motivation.