The EHR Core Research (ECR) program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad and enduring: STEM learning and STEM learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development. This study extends prior theoretical and empirical work on STEM learning and STEM learning environments into community college classrooms in developmental mathematics. Developmental math courses are a major academic gatekeeper for adequately preparing students for the work force, yet many students in community colleges fail to reach college-ready math proficiency even with remediation through developmental curricula. To address this need, this study will examine the impact of a brief but promising psychological intervention designed to enhance student motivation and course learning outcomes in developmental math. The investigators hypothesize that this intervention will lead to increased perceptions of interest and performance in mathematics, which in turn will, in the short term, result in improved performance (increased course pass rates) and persistence (decreased dropout rates) of students enrolled in the community college developmental math courses that are the focus of this study. Ultimately, the investigators anticipate the foundational evidence generated by this study will provide practitioners with the information necessary to optimize interventions based on individual differences and contextual factors (practical import), and have the potential to contribute to the development of theories about for whom and why interventions work (theoretical important).
Specifically, this study is designed to provide evidence of the efficacy and effectiveness of an expectancy value intervention, combining growth mindset and utility value components. Researchers at the University of Virginia and Valencia Community College (located in Orange and Osceola Counties, Florida) will collaborate on a series of trials of one of three treatment conditions (growth mindset only, utility value only, combined growth mindset and utility value) and a 'business as usual' control condition. Intervention trials will be contained within a semester, with follow-ups coming from administrative data sets. At the end of the three-year intervention cycle nine separate cohorts of students (n=5,600) will have participated in the study, nested within class sections (n=280), nested within teachers (n=40) at Valencia Community College. Of particular interest are the individual- and contextual- (classroom and teacher) level factors which might moderate or mediate the effects of the expectancy-value intervention. Accordingly, study participants will be randomly assigned to treatment conditions at the classroom level, enabling the investigators to explore whether the intervention is more effective in some classrooms and/or with some teachers than others. Primary data to explore mediating and moderating factors will be collected via administration of a self-report student motivation questionnaire, a teacher questionnaire, and to-be-developed instruments to survey students' perceptions of the classroom learning context and teachers' beliefs about learning and teaching practices in mathematics. Student demographic and performance data will be obtained from administrative records; additionally, instructors will be asked to provide classroom-level student performance data. Complementary qualitative data will be collected from students and teachers via separate student and teacher focus groups, individual student interviews, and think-aloud protocols elaborating on the student motivation questionnaire. Analyses of these data may have potentially important implications regarding the benefits of explicit consideration of contexts when developing theories of psychological interventions in education. Additionally, the study is designed to enable investigators to replicate the intervention across multiple cohorts (testing for consistency), and to follow students longitudinally (exploring potential intervention effects on more distal outcomes, e.g., persistence towards degree completion). The investigators hypothesize the expectancy-value intervention will be both resource-efficient and practically useful - capable of being delivered to students as online learning modules amenable to widespread dissemination across large sets of classrooms and institutions. Following completion of the study, (de-identified) study data will be made available to other researchers.
