Relevant Education in a Changing World: Expanding Value for the Motivation Sciences

The idea that education should be made relevant to students is long-standing and pervasive in American society. Recently, motivation scientists have clarified important characteristics of students’ relevance beliefs, ways to intervene, and individual characteristics moderating intervention effects. Yet, there has been little consideration of the role of situational constraints and sociocultural influences on students’ relevance appraisal processes. We describe how societal changes and broader educational purposes affect the issues that students consider to be relevant to their educational experiences and the values they subsequently attribute to their studies. After differentiating components of relevance and highlighting ways in which particular components may be influenced by changing sociocultural milieus, we consider the implications of these processes for the development of subjective task value beliefs. Specifically, we show how the proposed model of relevance helps to parse out aspects of relevance appraisals that can be used to differentiate between components of subjective task value and argue that there is need to expand current models proposed in expectancy-value theory (EVT). Finally, we explore how recent global events may impact the social construction of educational relevance and constrain students’ developing beliefs about the value of their educational opportunities and implications for future research and educators.