Relevance Is Something Students Build, Not Something We Announce

By the third week of a first-year course, many students have already decided how much effort it deserves. For students early in their academic careers, that decision often comes down to one question: why does this matter to me?

As we're spending time this month talking about Engagement, I wanted to present this review in response to one of the things faculty discuss most when it comes to why students disengage: relevance.

What the research suggests

The most useful work I know on this comes from Judith Harackiewicz and colleagues, who study utility-value interventions: short exercises that ask students to connect course material to their own lives.

In a randomized field study of 262 ninth graders, Hulleman and Harackiewicz (2009) had students write about the personal relevance of their science content. Students who began with low expectations of success gained roughly two-thirds of a letter grade. In a later randomized study in a large introductory college biology course (N = 1,040), a similar writing exercise reduced the performance gap for first-generation, underrepresented minority students by approximately 61% (Harackiewicz et al., 2016).

The detail that matters most for faculty is who does the connecting. Canning and Harackiewicz (2015), in “Teach It, Don’t Preach It,” found that students generating their own connections worked better than being told the connections. Direct messages about usefulness could even backfire for students who doubted their competence.

Five moves for the first weeks

1. Start with the question, not the topic. Open a unit with the problem the content helps solve. Students should meet the need before the concept.

2. Ask students to write the connection. Two or three low-stakes sentences, a few times a term: “Where might this show up in a goal you have?” Keep it ungraded or credit-for-completion so there is no “right” answer to guess.

3. Keep it near-term and concrete. This semester, the next course in the sequence, or a job a student could realistically hold in a few years will land better than “someday you will need this.”

4. Pair relevance with an early win. Value without confidence is fragile. A short, achievable first assignment with specific feedback gives students evidence that the effort pays off.

5. Expect relevance to differ. A first-generation student, a career changer, and a recent high school graduate will not find the same connections. Let all of them count.

A caveat worth stating

Much of this evidence comes from science and psychology gateway courses, and the effects are strongest for students who doubt their competence or have weaker prior performance. It is worth testing in your own context rather than assuming it transfers.

The bottom line

Making content relevant does not require redesigning a course. It requires a few minutes of structured reflection and a willingness to let students, rather than faculty, say why it matters. That is what we mean when we say engagement is co-created.

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(1), 47–71.

• Harackiewicz, J. M., Canning, E. A., Tibbetts, Y., Priniski, S. J., & Hyde, J. S. (2016). Closing achievement gaps with a utility-value intervention: Disentangling race and social class. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

• Hulleman, C. S., & Harackiewicz, J. M. (2009). Promoting interest and performance in high school science classes. Science, 326, 1410–1412.