Values, interests and environmental preferences for the school context

There is a burning desire to understand what shapes a students' pursuit of an education. There has been virtually no research on the values students hold that guide behavior. Miller and Brickman's (2004) theoretical model hypothesizes that a student's values develop in the sociocultural context of home and school. It is in the context of school that values are transformed into interests and goals to satisfy underlying needs (e.g., need of achievement). In this study we investigated how basic core values of students were related to the interests they reported and types of environments students preferred. Data was collected at a rural regional university in the U.S. 392 freshman students were administered the Profile Values Questionnaire (Schwartz, 1992) and the Holland Interest Inventory (Holland, 1996). These measures have strong validity evidence, plus the reliabilities for both of these measures were similar to those reported in previous studies. The mean rating of students' values and ranking was very similar to rankings found by Shalom Schwartz's (2001) studies. The correlations between values and interests indicated theoretically expected relationships between values and interests, and the types of environments, either, social or non-social, in which students likely prefer to complete their school tasks.