Can a work-relevance rationale support students’ utility value, autonomous motivation, and perceived competence? an exploratory, small-scale experiment in an online statistics course

Abstract Work relevance is increasingly emphasized in higher education, and instructors often explain how course content may be useful for future work to motivate students. Such work-relevance rationales may be common in quantitatively oriented courses that students find difficult or anxiety-provoking. However, experimental evidence regarding their motivational effects in higher education remains mixed, and little is known about potential psychological costs for students experiencing statistics anxiety. The present study was a small-scale exploratory field experiment examining an instructor-provided work-relevance rationale in a quantitative methods course. Specifically, it investigated whether the rationale influenced undergraduate psychology students’ utility value, autonomous motivation, and perceived competence. Seventy-six online students were assigned to a rationale or control condition and completed self-report measures following a short video intervention. Results showed no significant effects on utility value or autonomous motivation. Examination anxiety, a dimension of statistics anxiety, appeared to moderate the effect of the rationale on perceived competence, although this finding should be interpreted cautiously given the exploratory nature of the study and the uncertainty of the follow-up analyses. The pattern of results suggested that the rationale may be associated with lower perceived competence among students with higher examination anxiety. As an initial investigation of potential psychological costs of work-relevance rationales in online statistics education, the study identifies a theoretically and pedagogically important question for future research. If replicated in larger studies, the findings suggest that emphasizing work relevance may not be universally motivating and may have unintended negative consequences for students experiencing high evaluative anxiety.