The Effects of Relevance on Mental Effort.

According to Keller's Model of Motivation, one technique for increasing learners' motivation, and thus their mental effort, involves increasing the personal relevance of the material. When instruction is perceived as relevant, learners perceive that important personal needs are being met by the learning situation. The purpose of this study was to manipulate the degree of relevance present in both a videotaped and print version of a lesson to determine whether increasing the relevance of a lesson increases the amount of material effort invested. Students enrolled in a sophomore level education course at a large Midwestern university were invited to participate in a two-hour lesson on desktop publishing. Instructional materials consisted of four lessons: (1) a "standard" video on desktop publishing; (2) a motivationally enhanced videotape; (3) a text version of the standard lesson; and (4) a text version of the motivationally enhanced lesson. Assessment measures consisted of a self-report questionnaire, a computer program that measured response rates, and a posttest. Findings were consistent with the results of previous studies conducted with elementary and middle school students. Participants reported in the questionnaire that they invested more mental effort in learning from print versions of the lessons than in video-based versions. The students who received the video-based lesson had significantly longer reaction times to the secondary task measure. (Contains 26 references.) (AEF)