By Laura J. McNeill
Making classroom content more relevant to students’ lives and interests significantly enhances their motivation and engagement. In “Why Is This Relevant for Me?”: Increasing Content Relevance Enhances Student Motivation and Vitality, Johansen, Eliassen and Jeno (2023) demonstrate how a simple shift in assignment framing can transform student experience, particularly in technical courses.
Using self-determination theory as their framework, the researchers conducted a classroom experiment with nearly 70 university STEM students taking a statistics course. They found that:
- Students who received a “relevant” assignment (using climate data to analyze global warming) reported significantly higher independent motivation compared to those given a “generic” assignment (analyzing simulated dart scores)
- The relevance-enhanced group also showed higher energy, greater effort and maintained more positive emotional states during learning
- Students in the control group experienced an increase in negative emotions and decrease in positive emotions during the learning activity
- No additional instructional time was required — just a thoughtful reframing of the assignment content
Quick Strategies To Implement
- Connect to real-world applications — Replace abstract examples with data sets or scenarios from students’ disciplinary fields
- Highlight career relevance — Frame problems in terms of how professionals in students’ intended careers would use these skills
- Acknowledge meaning — Explicitly discuss why learning certain concepts matters for students’ future goals
- Provide choice — When possible, allow students to select topics or applications that interest them
- Use authentic data — Incorporate genuine research data rather than contrived examples
Making content relevant is especially valuable in required courses outside students’ primary interests (like statistics for biology majors). By implementing these strategies, faculty can significantly enhance student motivation, engagement and emotional well-being without adding to their workload or redesigning entire courses.
Reference: Johansen, M. O., Eliassen, S., & Jeno, L. M. (2023). “Why is this relevant for me?”: Increasing content relevance enhances student motivation and vitality. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1184804. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1184804