REASON Winter School 2019: Keynote Prof. Judith Harakiewicz

Connecting research and practice in social psychology – From the laboratory to motivation interventions in education
Judith Harackiewicz (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

It is essential that students perceive value in their academic work. I will discuss longitudinal studies that document the importance of perceived value for interest and performance in high school and college courses, as well as experimental laboratory studies that show the potential for promoting utility value and interest in students. This basic research provides the basis for three recent lines of intervention research, in which we took these laboratory findings to practice.

In one, we tested the potential of utility value interventions to promote interest and performance for high school students in science classes and for college students in an introductory psychology class. In a second line of research, we examined the role of parents in communicating utility value to their teens, and tested an intervention intended to encourage parental communication with teens about utility value. In a third, we tested the potential of utility-value interventions to close achievement gaps in a gateway college science class. Theoretically, this research contributes to our understanding of value transmission and interest development, and practically, this research suggests that teachers and parents can make important contributions to students’ academic performance by focusing on utility value.

Short Bio: Dr. Harackiewicz is a leading researcher in the study of motivation, working at the interface of social and educational psychology. She is a former editor of major journals in social and personality psychology, and her work has been published in top tier journals. She has received funding from NSF and NIH to conduct theory-based intervention research in educational contexts. Her expertise includes extensive experience with intervention research, working in family contexts, high school science classes, and college courses in psychology, chemistry and biology in both community college and university contexts. She employs randomized control trial methods to test the impact of utility value in motivating students to participate in science in general (in high school), and to perform better in biology and psychology classes, and in their college classes more generally. Her brief utility-value intervention with parents – intended to help them see the importance of math and science for their teen and encourage them to talk to their teen about science -- resulted in their teens taking on average, an additional semester of math or science in the last two years of high school. This research was awarded the SPSP 2013 Cialdini award “for the publication that best explicates social psychological phenomena through the use of field research methods and thereby demonstrates the relevance of the discipline to communities outside of academic social psychology.”