| Students often lose interest in critical foundational courses that act as a gateway to successive courses and careers. Utility value (UV) writing interventions have been designed to help students find the personal relevance and value of course material in order to promote interest and performance. However, little is known about how best to implement the intervention, in terms of the optimal type of scaffolding required, particularly in the 2-year college context where students may have different goals and motives than the traditional college samples studied in previous research. Using a randomized field experiment, this study tested two different ways of scaffolding a UV writing intervention by varying the source of UV information which was framed to be generated by former students in the course or the instructor, compared against a control writing assignment. In the context of introductory courses at several 2-year UW-college campuses, we examined how these interventions work, and for whom they are most effective, in terms of academic performance, interest, and perceived utility value. We found that the student-framed UV intervention made the course more interesting for students who were doing well in the course compared to the instructor-framed UV intervention. However, contrary to previous research, we found that students struggling in the course became less interested and perceived less utility value overall in UV conditions, compared to the control. When we examined the writing style and content of the essays, we found that all students were articulating more value and writing more informally in the UV conditions, as intended; however, struggling students did not benefit from this type of writing. We discovered that the essays were more focused on personal utility value than scientific content than in previous research, and we hypothesize that scientific content is an important factor that contributes to intervention efficacy. |
