Students in high school and college are expected to take on greater responsibility for regulating their own learning. As they navigate course demands and explore potential career paths, students are making decisions about what to attend to, how to engage, how much effort to invest, and how long to persist. Motivation and its regulation is key to this process (Sansone et al., 2019). We integrate insights about the importance of task value from situated expectancy-value theory (Eccles & Wigfield, 2020) and research on utility-value interventions (UVIs) that target task value with insights from the four-phase model of interest development (Renninger & Hidi, 2022) to identify ways to support students as they manage motivational challenges. Value and interest are often closely related, and, when considered separately, each positively predicts student effort. Rather than considering them in isolation, we consider how they may work together over time. UVIs can help students think about and articulate the usefulness of course topics, which has been found to enhance perceived task value and motivate engagement with course content (Harackiewicz & Priniski, 2018; Wigfield & Eccles, 2020). UVIs may be especially helpful when students have little interest in learning the content, but this effect may become more nuanced as students develop interest. We suggest a framework for integrating these perspectives, identify self-regulation challenges, and discuss possible ways to support this self-regulatory process. We also highlight future directions for research that emerge from this integration.
