Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons^™

Exploring The Influence Of Students' Perceptions Of Instructional Message Content Relevance And Experienced Cognitive Load On Students' Cognitive Learning, Benson T. Sexton

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

Connecting the relevance of course content to students’ lives has been a learning strategy for decades. In educational psychology, Keller (1983) suggested content relevance to be a component within the ARCS model to motivate students toward learning behaviors. Within instructional communication research, Frymier and Shulman (1995) argued that students enter classrooms with the expectation that they will understand the connection between the content and their lives. Specifically, students want to know why they are taking a course and how it impacts their interests, needs, and professional goals (Frymier, 2001). In both education and instructional communication literature, teacher content relevance strategies …