Promoting motivation in mathematics through personalized relevance interventions

Indeed, an impressive body of research shows that students’ expectancies and values are important predictors of their engagement and achievement at school, as well as their educational trajectories. However, these motivational beliefs in various academic domains, particularly in mathematics, typically decrease over the school years. It is therefore important to find ways to sustain motivation in the school context.

Short interventions to enhance the perceived relevance of the learning material for students’ lives have shown to be highly promising for promoting students’ motivation, achievement, and academic choices. Such interventions can thus represent a powerful, cost-efficient lever to promote students’ academic development. At the same time, prior effects found heterogeneous effects for different groups of students. Thus, it is important to examine how these interventions can be designed to be effective for specific groups of students.

In the project, the goal is therefore to systematically test how these interventions can be personalized for students with different characteristics. Based on prior intervention studies, a digital relevance intervention will be developed that enables personalization. The efficacy of this intervention will be tested in a randomized field trial with ninth grade students.

• Prof. Judith M. Harackiewicz (University of Madison-Wisconsin, Department of Psychology)

Previous studies: http://moma-tuebingen.de/en/