Investigating any bi-directional influence between an educational intervention and the subjective task value of digital literacy

[摘要] Digital literacy, or the ability to locate, evaluate, and integrate online sources, is an essential skill in the modern world of 'fake news,” biased reporting, and misinformation. Unfortunately, its development is often found to be lacking in current educational settings. This thesis was part of a larger project in which an educational intervention was designed and administered to 250+ high school students over five classroom sessions to cultivate these abilities. Here, I analyzed any bi-directional influence between a specific facet of student motivation (subjective task value) and the intervention. Subjective task value (STV), a component of Expectancy Value Theory, is a measurement of how much one values a specific task or skill. Given the numerous positive outcomes to which STV has been associated, I hypothesized that higher pre-test STV ratings of digital literacy would result in better post-test outcomes for students. In addition, I hypothesized that this extensive intervention would increase overall STV ratings of digital literacy. As predicted, we found that the intervention did increase STV of digital literacy significantly across all conditions. Furthermore, we showed that higher pre-test STV ratings were correlated with higher post-test assessment scores. However, this relationship was not moderated by the intervention. Thus, this project provided evidence of an additional benefit provided by the intervention (increasing STV ratings of digital literacy), and demonstrated areas where the intervention could be improved to address its insignificant moderating effect (further measurement and condition development).

[发布机构] the University of Pittsburgh