Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2017

DOI

10.3102/1185055

Publication Title

2017 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association

Pages

15 pp.

Conference Name

2017 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 27-May 1, 2017, San Antonio, Texas

Abstract

Intervention research that supported the benefit of students' construction of relevance through writing has commonly defined relevance narrowly as utility value - perceived instrumentality of the content to the student's career goals. In comparison, we employed a broad multidimensional conception of relevance. We also investigated how the content may influence relevance constructions. Qualitative content analysis of 38 undergraduate introductory biology students' relevance writing about the concepts of Evolution and Organismic diversity supported the dimensional variablilty of relevance constructions including the self-aspect connected to the content, the kind of connection made, and the type of perceived value, with some notable differences between the two biology concepts. We discuss the theoretical and educational implications of this content-specific and multidimensional conception of relevance.

Rights

© 20017 The Authors.

"Each presenter retains copyright on the full-text paper. Repository users should follow legal and ethical practices in their use of repository material; permission to reuse material must be sought from the presenter, who owns copyright."

Original Publication Citation

Davidson, Y. S., Kaplan, A., Hartwell, M., Mara, K., Balsai, M., Cromley, J. G., Perez, T., & Dai, T. (2017, 4/28/2017). The multidimensionality and content-specificity of perceived relevance: Undergraduates' relevance constructions of evolution and organismic diversity. Paper presented at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Retrieved [10/29/2024]. from the AERA Online Paper Repository.

ORCID

0000-0002-2008-2555 (Perez)

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