Utility-Value Intervention in School: Students’ Migration and Parental Educational Backgrounds as Moderators

Abstract

A growing body of research suggests that utility-value interventions can promote students’ academic motivation and achievement. Moreover, there is evidence that minimal interventions are particularly useful for ethnic minority and first-generation students at college. Whether this is also the case with high school students belonging to minorities and having low parental educational background, is unclear. In a double-blind randomized field experiment with N = 439 academic-track students from 9th grade in Germany, we investigated whether a short version of an established utility-value intervention (i.e., quotations evaluation intervention) would promote the students’ utility, attainment, and intrinsic values in math and their math test performance after the intervention. Moreover, we investigated if such short-term intervention effects were moderated by students’ migration background and parental educational background. We found significant positive main effects of the intervention on the students’ utility and attainment values in math compared to a control group. The effect on attainment value was especially pronounced for students with migration background whose parents held no university entrance certificate. We discuss the practical relevance of these findings and highlight challenges for future research in this field.