Example choice and relevance intervention in teaching and learning mathematics and science

Many educators believe that making learning materials relevant for student's lives leads to student's engagement and better understanding of the subject, but experimental evidence to support that is still lacking (Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009). Professor Judith Harackiewicz and her colleagues developed a teaching method called relevance intervention that has been shown to increase interest (e.g. Durik & Harackiewicz, 2007; Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009). Research on relevance intervention has shown that its effects are not straightforward, and depend on characteristics of the individual and the learning material, like the culture participants come from, their initial interest in specific topic and the type of intervention (Shechter et al., 2011). Results of Reber et al. (2009) on a method called example choice indicate a potential for increasing students' interest by giving them an opportunity to choose examples they want to work on. Following the work of Hulleman & Harackiewicz (2009) and Reber et al. ( 2009), this project will investigate whether relevance intervention combined with example choice increases students' interest, performance and willingness to learn mathematics in the future. This intervention is expected to help students make connections between mathematics in classroom and in their everyday lives as well as giving them a choice of topic where they can find those connections. The project's goal is to develop a new, combined example choice and relevance intervention appropriate for a Norw egian sample. The project will start with an analysis of the first data on relevance intervention collected in Norway. During the project experimental paradigms for investigating example choice in combination with relevance intervention will be developed and tested on a sample of students in Wisconsin. This data will serve as a basis for a larger study on the effectiveness of example choice and relevance intervention that will be conducted in Norway after the visit.