Making Learning Personally Meaningful: A New Framework for Relevance Research

Personal relevance goes by many names in the motivation literature, stemming from a number of theoretical frameworks. Currently these lines of research are being conducted in parallel with little synthesis across them, perhaps because there is no unifying definition of the relevance construct within which this research can be situated. In this paper we propose a new framework to synthesize existing research on relevance and provide a common platform for researchers to communicate and collaborate. In light of this new framework we review the role of relevance in three prominent theories in the motivation literature: the four-phase model of interest development, expectancy-value theory, and self-determination theory. We then explore eight relevance constructs commonly used in the literature and the educational interventions that derive from them. Finally, we offer a synthesis of these constructs and suggest some directions for future research.