1. Teacher Task Value Statements
"Why Should I Care About Science?”
An Ongoing Investigation of Teacher Task Value Statements and Their Impact On Student Engagement
Matthew J. Schell, Kimberly M. Alberts, Patrick N. Beymer, Jennifer A. Schmidt
Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Program, Michigan State University
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No: DRL Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. 1
The purpose of this ongoing study is to investigate how teachers’ efforts to relate science content to students’ lives impacts student engagement in high school science classrooms. Specifically, this research employs the expectancy-value framework to characterize the types of task value statements science teachers make during the course of everyday instruction.
Purpose
Teacher Task Value Statements
Utility Value
Statements indicating that science is useful or not useful for some purpose. Utility value was coded broadly to include any connections of science to daily life (other research has called these relevancy statements).
Examples
“Anybody ever try to blow dry their hair while in the bath?  You would electrocute yourself because distilled water is pure water, but your tap water has lots of ions dissolved in it, so it does conduct electricity.”
“First thing you do when you drink orange juice, what is it?...You shake it up. Right? Why do you have to shake up orange juice?...All that pulp settles to the bottom, right? And if you pour off the orange juice before you shake it up, you get this thin liquid stuff, so you shake up the orange juice to mix it up. It’s a heterogeneous mixture.”
Intrinsic Value
Statements indicating that science is/isn’t enjoyable, interesting, cool, etc.
“We’re not gonna do naming acids until we get to our acid and bases chapter, we do titrations, and all that fun stuff. You get to make pink liquids.”
“We’re gonna make butter. How fun is that?!”
Attainment Value
Statements indicating that doing well on a task is/isn’t important to one’s self-concept.
No attainment value statements currently identified.
Cost
Statements related to the amount of investment of time/effort inherent in a task or what must be given up in order to complete a task.
“Single replacement, well that should be an easy one, right?  These should be tattooed in your brains by now, because we spent all last week doing these, right?”
“You can get that done pretty darn quick.”
Methods
12 high school science classrooms, 244 students
Each classroom video recorded 10x (200 hours of video)
Teacher statements coded for presence of task value using Nvivo 11 software
Inter-rater reliability: 87% agreement between two coders on identification of statements
Student engagement measured repeatedly via Experience Sampling Method administered during recorded class sessions (~4000 responses)
Additional data on student aspirations and beliefs collected with surveys
Theoretical Framework
The theoretical framework guiding the design of this study is expectancy-value theory. Expectancy-value theory hypothesizes that expectancies for success and subjective task value both influence outcomes of academic interest. Furthermore, both expectancies and subjective task value are influenced by the social world, cognitive processes, and motivational beliefs. This study specifically focuses on the relationship between task value and engagement. This framework has informed theory and research in instructional design regarding how teachers can promote relevance of course content in instruction (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000).
Emerging Themes*
Teachers differ in the frequency and consistency with which they make task value statements in class
Within teacher variation may be related to style of lesson (lecture, lab, small group work, etc.)
Teachers may vary systematically in the types of value statements they make (i.e. some teachers make statements regarding the importance of information for testing purposes, while others relate science to daily life)
Across teachers, statements about utility value are most common (~75%)
*Based on ~35 percent of coded data
Finish coding video data
Examine relationships between teacher statements and students’ momentary engagement
Examine relationships between teacher statements and longer term achievement outcomes (grades, aspirations, etc.)
Next Steps