Relevance for Learning and Motivation in Education

Abstract

Questions of educational relevance have surfaced frequently among educators, philosophers, and social scientists for centuries. Recently motivation scientists have reinvigorated such questions and are directing considerable empirical attention to develop interventions to help students make connections between what they do in school and their lives. These intervention efforts have had mixed results, and in response researchers have pointed to the need for increased clarity around the construct of relevance: what it means and how it should theoretically relate to academic motivation and achievement. In this introduction, a brief history of interdisciplinary perspectives on educational relevance and overview of emerging views among researchers in education and psychology.

Full text

Running head: RELEVANCE IN EDUCATION RESEARCH
Relevance for Learning and Motivation in Education
Jeffrey R. Albrecht & Stuart A. Karabenick
1406 School of Education
610 E. University Ave
Ann Arbor, MI, USA 48109-1259
Lead author contact: jrajr@umich.edu
Abstract
Questions of educational relevance have surfaced frequently among educators, philosophers, and
social scientists for centuries. Recently motivation scientists have reinvigorated such questions
and are directing considerable empirical attention to develop interventions to help students make
connections between what they do in school and their lives. These intervention efforts have had
mixed results, and in response researchers have pointed to the need for increased clarity around
the construct of relevance: what it means and how it should theoretically relate to academic
motivation and achievement. This special issue draws together researchers from diverse
theoretical paradigms to address this need. In this introduction, a brief history of interdisciplinary
perspectives on educational relevance and overview of emerging views among researchers in
education and psychology.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Avi Kaplan for his invitation to produce this special issue and to our
contributors for their enduring commitment and effort to addressing the conceptual and
procedural challenges facing the motivation sciences. Further, we thank the many reviewers who
devoted their time and attention to help clarify and strengthen authors’ work and advance the
motivation sciences.

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Relevance for Learning and Motivation in Education
“The theoretical problem, with relevance as with virtue, is to say in what it consists and why,
thus specified, it ought to be pursued.”
Israel Scheffler, Reflections on Educational Relevance (p. 764)
Brief History of a Controversial Concept
The issue of educational relevance has surfaced frequently over the past several centuries,
focused on the function or purpose of education for societies and individuals. In keeping with
calls to understand the philosophical roots of educational psychology (Alexander, 2003), we
describe some of the historical issues around educational relevance and relate it to how
researchers in this field discuss it today. Philosophers have long argued that education should
serve both individual and collective purposes, such as preserving cultural knowledge, creating an
ideal state, informing the future citizenry, producing human capital for industry, and promoting
social and emotional development (Ozmon & Craver, 1995). Over time, prominent educational
theorists and social commentators have primarily considered the issue from their vantage point
of authority and influence, with little regard for students’ opinions on the matter, often as part of
a sociopolitical agenda (e.g., Gibbons, 1998). Recent surveys suggest that American adults hold
many diverging viewpoints on the issue (Walker, 2016), and some have argued that everyone has
their own unique beliefs regarding the purpose of education (Sloan, 2012). Still, members of the
education and psychology research communities see it as imperative that education be made
relevant to students’ lives, interests, and cultural backgrounds (National Research Council,
2003). Given this predicament, it isn’t difficult to understand the sentiment of many teachers
who are daunted by the prospect of making education relevant to classes full of increasingly
diverse students (Bridgeland, Dilulio, & Balfanz, 2009). To complicate matters, there is little

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consensus on what it even means to make education relevant to students. The purpose of this
special issue is to help clarify the meaning of relevance and to bring together insights from
diverse research programs to aid efforts to promote relevance in education.
Not everyone agrees that education should or even can be made relevant, and such
disagreements often highlight the uncomfortable fact that there are significant disputes, even
among educational administrators, about the purposes of educational institutions. In a recent
article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, for example, Braswell (2017) insisted that
educators “must recognize the broader social affliction that relevance culture has become,”
noting that arguments over the relevance of education are ultimately about selling initiatives
(e.g., offering humanities courses) through appeals to their extrinsic value (e.g., creating human
capital), rather than accepting such initiatives on account of their presumed intrinsic worth (e.g.,
enriching one’s life). He stressed that authorities and social critics often bend and restrict
conversations to promote their own ends by defining what is “relevant” in ways that exclude
other potential sources of value. For instance, Gibbons (1998) argued that relevance should “be
judged primarily in terms of outputs, the contribution that higher education makes to national
economic performance” (pp. 1-2), thereby excluding non-economic sources from considerations
of the value of higher education.
While there is validity to Braswell’s (2017) critique, his suggestion to “pull relevance off
of its pedestal,” contradicts the position of educators and educational researchers who recognize
the educative and motivational potential of making curricula relevant to students’ lives. Problems
arise when educational relevance is framed to focus solely on society’s broader agendas at the
expense of students’ goals and interests. As Gilman and Anderman (2006) noted:

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Given the current emphasis in the United States on standards, accountability, and
assessment, a thorough understanding of student motivation and the contextual effects
that influence motivation is essential towards transforming schools from perceived
intellectual prisons, devoid of relevance and personal meaning, to environments that
support exploration, learning, and creativity among all students (p. 326).
As this passage suggests, there is great need to understand educational relevance from students’
perspectives, particularly regarding efforts to promote achievement and motivation. While it’s
not hard to find evidence that many students share a similar (albeit scaled-down) belief with
Gibbons (1998) that education should serve their economic needs (Pryor et al., 2012),
undoubtedly, most teachers who have sought to instill a passion for learning their subject
recognize the need for students and society alike to acknowledge the value of education beyond
merely addressing economic needs. Critically, students are very often highly receptive to such
impassioned and novel visions of what education and disciplinary learning can mean, and they
crave experiences that will broaden their often restricted understanding of the role of education
in their lives (Albrecht, 2012).
Paralleling Braswell’s (2017) position, over a century ago, Dewey (1900) argued that
discussions of relevance must be expanded to pursue a “liberation from narrow utilities,” which
other researchers have since echoed (e.g., Brophy, 2009), popularizing efforts to make education
relevant not only to satisfy the priorities of social authorities but also to improve students’
academic achievement, motivation, and continued passion for learning. In My Pedagogic Creed,
Dewey (1897) stated that “Education...must begin with a psychological insight into the child’s
capacities, interests, and habits” (p. 2). Throughout his work, he maintained that such insights
were critical for making education relevant to students’ lives and experiences, later describing

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the cognitive processes through which individuals perceive connections between experiences and
use the knowledge gleaned to engage in reflective judgment (Dewey, 1910). He further insisted
that relevance appraisal processes have important implications for academic achievement and
motivation:
[Curricular content] needs to be psychologized; turned over, translated into the immediate
and individual experiencing within which it has its origin and significance...When the
subject-matter has been psychologized, that is, viewed as an out-growth of present
tendencies and activities, it is easy to locate in the present some obstacle, intellectual,
practical, or ethical, which can be handled more adequately if the truth in question be
mastered. This need supplies motive for the learning. An end which is the child's own
carries him on to possess the means of its accomplishment (Dewey, 1902, pp. 8-9).
Thus, Dewey laid the philosophical foundations for current efforts in educational
psychology to examine relevance as a psychological phenomenon related to academic
achievement and motivation. In this special issue, researchers describe recent conceptual and
empirical advances in the study of relevance. Accordingly, we begin by describing the rise of
relevance as an explicit, psychological construct and some of the challenges to clarifying its
place within the motivation science lexicon. Much of the work has originated in interventions to
facilitate students’ adaptive motivational beliefs.
Recent Popularity of Relevance Interventions
Over the past few decades, the idea that education should be made relevant to students
has been studied and endorsed by motivation researchers in education and psychology. The
National Research Council’s Committee on Increasing High School Students’ Engagement and
Motivation to Learn (NRC, 2003) reported findings from extensive motivation research and

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concluded: “The evidence suggests that the instructional program...needs to be relevant to and
build on students’ cultural backgrounds and personal experiences, and provide opportunities for
students to engage in authentic tasks that have meaning in the world outside of school” (p. 94).
Since the NRC published their report, researchers have developed relevance interventions
that seek to promote students’ beliefs that what they do in school connects in meaningful ways to
their lives. Initial findings from such interventions were promising, showing positive effects on
academic achievement and motivation (for reviews, see Karabenick & Urdan, 2014; Lazowski &
Hulleman, 2016); however, some recent attempts to apply these interventions in different
contexts have produced null and even negative results (Albrecht & Karabenick, 2017), even
leading some to categorically state that “Trying to make the [instructional] material relevant to
students’ interests doesn’t work” (Willingham, 2009, p. 63). Such findings have spurred
increased attention to the situational factors and psychological mechanisms that moderate
relevance intervention outcomes, including relevance appraisal processes and individual
differences. Much of that work is reviewed in this special issue, and although such interventions
have resulted in some progress they have yet to resolve central concerns about the meaning of
relevance itself.
As a consequence, motivation researchers now recognize the need to address such issues
as how the concept of relevance is similar to and distinct from other motivation constructs, and
what relevance contributes to understanding motivation, achievement, and learning (Rosenzweig
& Wigfield, 2016). Attempts to improve conceptual clarity and operational definitions of
relevance include a recent symposium — Experiencing Relevance: Clarifying the Definition of a
Vital Motivational Concept — that challenged the educational research community to develop
more explicit conceptualizations of relevance (Hartwell & Kaplan, 2014). However, all but one

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presentation in that symposium equated relevance with utility value, the perceived usefulness of
a task for helping facilitate one’s goals (Eccles et al., 1983). In response, a later symposium
(Albrecht & Karabenick, 2016) focused on including researchers who offered a broader array of
perspectives, which prompted an invitation to produce this special issue designed to bring
together common and divergent perspectives on the construct.
To summarize, inquiries into the relevance of education have been pursued by
philosophers, political commentators, and social scientists for millennia. Whether considering
implications for policy, instruction, or individual psychology, each perspective essentially
derives from a common question: “What purposes does and should education serve?” One hope
is that relevance can serve a bridging function that unites a variety of theoretical perspectives in
the motivation sciences (Kaplan, 2016). Accordingly, we challenged contributors from the
education and psychology research communities to describe their perspectives on individual and
social processes involved in relevance-based motivation and achievement interventions and
outcomes. The resultant articles describe a variety of classroom- and student-level interventions,
targeting relevance through diverse instructional approaches, curricular designs, and learning
technologies.
As the philosopher of education, Israel Scheffler (1969) claimed, “nothing is either
relevant or irrelevant in and of itself. Relevant to what, how, and why? – that is the question” (p.
764). The following briefly explicates the significance of these questions in efforts to clarify the
meaning and implications of relevance for educators and motivation researchers.
Relevant to What?
In order to make their courses relevant, educators must first consider the focal issues
toward which curriculum and instruction should be made relevant. Consistent with Dewey’s

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perspective noted above, motivational psychologists contend that focal issues should be
personally meaningful to students, e.g., relating to their cultural experiences, goals, and interests
(NRC, 2003). One of the most common assumptions dating back to Dewey’s time is that
education should be made relevant to career aspirations. Illustrating the pervasiveness of this
view, a recent survey found that education administrators, parents, and students alike in the
United States view preparation for future careers as a very important role for academic
institutions (Langer Research Associates, 2016). However, as unemployment has declined over
the last several years, so have students’ beliefs regarding the relative importance of career
preparation; indeed, students are increasingly endorsing goals of personal and intellectual
development, such as exploring interests and developing appreciation for ideas (Eagan et al.,
2017). Consistent with this perspective, contributors to the present special issue include students’
personal interests, short- and long-term goals, identity targets, intrinsic and extrinsic goals, and
cultural backgrounds.
One of the challenges to making courses relevant is negotiating contextual constraints. As
noted by Hartwell and Kaplan (this issue), the course in which relevance is appraised likely
restricts the plausible connections that can be made to particular focal issues, i.e., topics of
concern or interest to an individual that frame his/her beliefs about relevance. For instance, while
studying the arts is quite obviously relevant to enhancing aesthetic experiences, it is much more
difficult to imagine it contributing directly to one’s goal of attaining job security, which would
be a more plausible outcome of studying business or economics. If self-knowledge is one’s goal,
then it would be more practical to enroll in a psychology or philosophy course than calculus or
chemistry.

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Another contextual challenge is diversity. As mentioned above, some have argued that
beliefs regarding the purpose of education are unique, suggesting that attempts to make
education relevant to every student would likely require individualized instruction. Such
requirements can be daunting, perhaps impossible at times, given other demands on teachers and
the challenges of connecting with each student on a level to identify personally meaningful
background experiences, aspirations, and interests. Further, there are several issues that can arise
when educators attempt to make curricula relevant. Dewey (1916) warned that in doing so
teachers may remove an opportunity for students to exercise their own capacities for reflective
judgment, even though they can provide students with pre-constructed connections that serve to
scaffold relevance appraisal processes, claims that have since found support in recent empirical
research (e.g., on facilitating cognitive transfer; National Research Council, 2000). Also worth
considering is that providing students with connections may be less personally meaningful
because of their apparent lack of autonomy when doing so. Teachers may even be insufficiently
knowledgeable about the experiences toward which they try to make the curriculum relevant,
resulting in connections that are superficial or inaccurate.
Several contributions included here address these issues directly, others address them
implicitly. Some interventions use relevance examples that are constructed by teachers or
researchers (e.g., direct communication, goal framing, personalization). Others require students
to construct their own relevance examples (e.g., self-generation, directed reappraisal), or give
students examples of relevance connections from the perspective of researchers or peers (e.g.,
critical reflection). At this point, it is unclear which of these sources will have the greatest effect
on students’ motivation. To complicate matters further, evidence suggests that different sources

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will produce different results based upon students’ individual differences (Canning &
Harackiewicz, 2015; Durik et al., 2015; Gaspard et al., 2015).
Relevant How?
Another conceptual issue Scheffler (1969) highlighted is determining the way that
education is considered relevant, i.e., clarifying the nature of the relevance relationship. For
instance, students often differentiate between applied and conceptual relevance, where the
former suggests that knowledge gained can be used in some applied context and the latter that
knowledge fits within or otherwise relates to other knowledge schemas (Albrecht & Karabenick,
2015). A major distinction noted by several contributors to this special issue is the difference
between personal and impersonal relevance. While some provide evidence that students
distinguish between more personal affectively- and impersonal cognitively-oriented relevance
connections (see Hartwell & Kaplan, this issue), and several suggest that impersonal relevance
may uniquely relate to students’ academic achievement and motivational outcomes, all
contributors focused primarily on personal, self-relevance.
Within the broader category of self-relevance, some argue that relevance is best thought
of as comparable to different components of task value, types of extrinsic motivation, or levels of
identification with the purposes of engaging with academic tasks. As noted above, several
researchers over the years have suggested that relevance is synonymous with utility value and,
from a self-determination theoretical perspective, integrated regulation. More recently, however,
theorists have expanded upon those perspectives to include relevance that is more intrinsically
oriented (e.g., Priniski et al., this issue). To illustrate, when asked on a survey what made a
politics course relevant and/or irrelevant, one university student simply said, “I love politics, that
is why it is relevant” (Albrecht, 2013).

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Knowing how an activity is relevant should help researchers parse out and predict
different learning and motivation outcomes. For instance, when relevance is cold and impersonal
it may still be integral to learning, whereas warmer, more personal relevance may be most
congenial to affective and motivational outcomes (Albrecht, 2016). Relevance that merely relates
to extrinsic goals may promote motivation that is less adaptive or enduring than relevance to
goals that are more personally central or integral to the activity (Vansteenkiste et al., this issue).
Scaffolding Relevance Construction
As alluded to above with regard to teachers’ roles in promoting relevance, a primary goal
of relevance interventions is to scaffold students’ appraisal processes that connect curricular
activities and valued goals, interests, and personal experiences. In this special issue, five
approaches are described based on original research and reviews of the existing relevance
intervention research: direct communication, personalization, self-generation, critical reflection,
and directed reappraisal (see Table 1).
Direct communication (typically by researchers, instructors, or text) provides students
with information regarding the value of engaging with a task (Durik & Harackiewicz, 2007).
Direct communication is based on assumptions about the topics most students will find relevant,
and requires the least effortful reflection on the student’s part. Like direct communication,
personalization tailors curricular activities to students’ background knowledge and interests,
typically through instructional technologies that give students the opportunity to indicate which
topics they find interesting and presumably relevant (Walkington, 2013). Similar to direct
communication, it does not require much effortful student reflection.
Self-generation instructs students to construct or otherwise independently identify the
value of engaging in academic tasks (Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009). In comparison to other

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approaches to help students appraise curricular relevance, self-generation requires the most
effortful reflection and creativity from students and may be the most personalized in that students
have complete freedom to identify what they deem authentic relevance connections. As the least
scaffolded approach, self-generation has been found to elicit a range of well to poorly crafted
relevance connections (Albrecht, Rausch, & Karabenick, 2017). Students are likely to vary in
terms of how much time and effort they are willing to expend in the self-generation task and how
much background knowledge they have regarding the course content itself.
Critical reflection requires students to evaluate others’ relevance claims and requires
considerable effortful reflection (Gaspard et al., 2015). Since students are provided with
arguments regarding curricular relevance, the process may also serve as a scaffold and reduce
cognitive load. Finally, directed reappraisal involves extensive instruction on attitudes and
attitude change that guides students through a process of reconsidering their beliefs regarding the
value of their curricular activities (Acee & Weinstein, 2010). Directed reappraisal thus provides
the most elaborate scaffolding but still requires extensive effort as students consider new ideas
and engage in multiple activities that apply those ideas. Research that has combined these
approaches found that directly communicating relevance to students before asking them to self-
generate relevance appears to scaffold the latter process (Canning & Harackiewicz, 2015).
Organization of the Special Issue
Given the variety of perspectives, the issues of relevance conceptualization and
approaches to relevance intervention strongly called for a broader discussion. In response, this
special issue draws upon multidisciplinary perspectives to expand current understandings and
invites a wider audience to the table to inform the development of effective, targeted, and
empirically supported relevance interventions. Content was therefore designed to: (a) help

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educators examine the role of relevance in their instruction, (b) provide researchers with broader
explanatory mechanisms for intervention effects, and (c) suggest ways to refine interventions or
identify areas of study needing further development. To facilitate these outcomes, authors were
invited to consider several big-picture questions: (a) How should educators think about
relevance? How much responsibility should an educator realistically accept or relegate to
students for making coursework relevant? (b) Which psychosocial mechanisms seem most
plausible for explaining relevance in education and which can be safely ruled out? (c) Which
aspects of relevance interventions produce consistent results and which require further
refinement?
For answers to these questions, and more, we selected contributors who were conducting
research in these areas, concerned with conceptual issues regarding the relevance construct, and
would serve to highlight the differences among research paradigms. For example, some
researchers focus heavily on applied questions in education, whereas others focus more heavily
on basic research questions in psychology. Collectively, articles in this special issue address all
three Journal of Experimental Education sections—Cognition and Instruction, Motivation and
Social Processes, and Measurement and Research Methods—with each one placing emphasis on
one of the domains. The following briefly describes the rationale for including each of the
contributions, organized by the respective sections to which they contribute.
For the Cognition and Instruction section, we invited contributions from Taylor Acee and
Candace Walkington, because their research has focused more than others on innovative
instructional approaches to scaffold the development of students’ relevance beliefs, particularly
by considering the cognitive, affective, and self-regulatory mechanisms at work in the relevance
appraisal process. Taylor Acee and Claire Weinstein (2010) developed an approach to improve

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students’ attitudes about the value of statistics, using an elaborate, multicomponent writing and
reflection task. The approach highlights the importance of promoting students’ awareness of
their attitudes toward statistics, beliefs they could change those attitudes, and improve their
capacity to regulate their motivation. Based on this prior work they were tasked to further
develop their theoretical model. Sadly, Claire passed away unexpectedly during the summer of
2016, a great loss to the educational research community. In honor of her memory, Acee and
colleagues contributed an article further synthesizing the literatures on attitude change and self-
regulation, providing a more detailed model of the cognitive-affective processes initiated through
task value interventions and strategies that students can use to regulate their own motivation.
Candace Walkington and her colleagues have developed learning technologies to
promote interest development through personalized instruction in high school algebra, which
recognizes the importance of students’ relevance appraisal processes, as well as the vagueness of
the concept of relevance itself (e.g., Walkington, 2013). For this reason, we invited her to
develop prior work, which Walkington and Bernacki have used to provide conceptual
clarification of the relevance construct and detail several key issues for instructors and
researchers seeking to influence students’ relevance perceptions.
For the Motivation and Social Processes section, we invited contributions from Judy
Harackiewicz and Maarten Vansteenkiste who consider relevance from two distinct and highly
influential theoretical perspectives (expectancy-value theory and self-determination theory,
respectively). Two of the most well-known relevance interventions to date emerging from an
expectancy-value framework were designed to enhance students’ utility value beliefs and
situational interest. The process involved helping them identify connections between what they
were required to learn in their respective courses and their goals, either by directly

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communicating value claims (e.g., Durik & Harackiewicz, 2007) or by asking students to self-
generate relevance connections (e.g., Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009). Having initially viewed
relevance as synonymous with utility value (Durik, Schmidt, Shumow, & Rodenbeck, 2014;
Hulleman & Kosovich, 2014; Harackiewicz, Tibbets, & Canning, 2014), relevance has recently
been expanded to include connections between learning tasks and other life domains or outcomes
than strictly personal goals (see Hulleman, Kosovich, Barron, & Daniel, 2016), which Priniski,
Hecht, and Harackiewicz elaborate in their contribution to this issue.
One of the major criticisms of relevance framed within expectancy-value theory comes
from researchers in self-determination theory (SDT), who have conducted relevance
interventions for well over a decade. In particular, Maarten Vansteenkiste and his colleagues
have criticized the fact that the utility value construct glosses over critical qualitative differences
in goals that have different implications for achievement and motivation (for a review, see
Vansteenkiste et al., 2009). In this special issue, Vansteenkiste and colleagues develop their
conceptualization of relevance and clarify its place in the process of internalization of self-
regulation. Further, they offer recommendations for educators seeking to intervene on students’
relevance perceptions to promote self-determined motivation.
For the Measurement and Research Methods section, we invited contributions from Matt
Hartwell and researchers from the University of Tübingen. Hartwell and Kaplan (2014) describe
a task value intervention conducted in 9th grade science classes, which used an inductive, highly
situated, mixed-methods approach to examine relevance as a phenomenological experience,
whereas other researchers typically approach relevance deductively, i.e., as a preconceived
construct grounded in theory. Further, Hartwell and Kaplan considered relevance using person-
centered analyses in contrast to other relevance research that has relied exclusively on variable-

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centered analytic approaches. Among the novel features of research from the Tübingen group is
their focus on fine-grained sub-facets of task value components (Gaspard et al., 2014; Trautwein
et al., 2013), which implicitly links relevance to different aspects of task value rather than, as
describe previously, restricting relevance to utility value. Drawing upon data from that line of
research, Nagengast and colleagues describe methodological advances to help researchers clarify
the effects of motivational interventions and demonstrate the procedure using their findings from
a recent relevance intervention trial.
Finally, we invited Patricia Alexander to comment on contributions to this special issue
on relevance conceptualization and interventions. Her broad and deep familiarity with research
in educational psychology and engagement with researchers provides the unique vantage point of
someone with such extensive and intellectually rigorous contributions to the field. Importantly,
Alexander encourages educational psychologists to confront critical conceptual challenges in the
field (Alexander, Schallert, & Hare, 1991; Dinsmore, Alexander, & Loughlin, 2008; Murphy &
Alexander, 2000). In her commentary, she highlights several areas in which the contributions
provide clarity regarding relevance as a psychological construct and offers timely critiques and
insights for future research efforts in this area.
Conclusion
As a long-standing issue of debate among social commentators and educators, questions
regarding the relevance of education have reemerged as a topic of concern and some contention
among motivation researchers. In particular, motivation scientists have focused attention on the
individual psychology of relevance appraisal processes and beliefs, rather than upon educational
policy and curricular content. Among motivation scientists, there is a general consensus that
helping students comprehend meaningful connections between what they do and learn in school

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and the issues that concern them in their everyday lives should promote academic motivation and
achievement. However, the field has struggled to find consensus regarding the meaning of
relevance as a psychological construct, which is likely due to the implicit assumption that people
know what it means for schooling to be relevant to students’ lives. This special issue confronts
the challenge of explicitly conceptualizing relevance to facilitate conceptual deliberation and
consensus and ultimately to help instructors promote relevance appraisals and perceptions in
their instructional practice. In so doing, we hope this special issue provides a much-needed
reflection on the potentials and limitations of current intervention practices and contributes to
promoting coherence and dialogue in the field of relevance intervention research and theory.

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