A preliminary study towards the development of an instrument to measure motivation to achieve in school among adolescents

• Main Author: Mattakottil, Abraham
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 1976
• Subjects: Motivation in education; Teenagers > Psychology; Counseling
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/374; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7212&context=etd_masteral
• Institution: De La Salle University

This is a preliminary study towards the development of an objective-projective technique to measure motivation to achieve in school among adolescents. The basic approach was that of apperception with the difference that both the stimuli and the responses were structured with the aim of arriving at an objective measure. The stimulus-pictures used in the construction of items were of five broad categories : 1. pictures or individuals reflecting thinking or affective state 2. pictures representing some form of action, individually or in groups 3. abstract designs made of lines and arrows 4. neutral-symbolic pictures of objectives, scenes or situations and 5. silhouette of individuals. Each item consisted of a stimulus-picture and a set of four responses in the form of possible descriptions or explanations of a given picture. Of the four short descriptions given, one was designed to reflect one of the five categories of the construct. The construction of the correct (achievement-motive-reflecting) responses was based on the operational definitions of the specific responses and the judgement of the designer of the instrument. Out of fifty items, 25 were grouped to make Form A of the instrument, and the rest were assigned to Form B, according to the following distribution of categories of responses : affective, conceptual, purposive, instrumental, and evaluative. Each subject was scored for his achievement motive by adding up the number of correct responses. The instrument was field tested among 60 high school seniors, 30 boys and 30 girls, from 6 schools. The analysis of data yielded some encouraging results and incentive for further research towards the development of an objective-projective device for assessing achievement motivation. The degree of relationship between the 5 categories of responses, and the instrument as a whole provided further support to the promising nature of the instrument. Among the various types of stimulus-pictures used, those representing some form of action and neutral symbolic pictures seemed more effective for use as stimuli than the others. The correlations obtained between the performance in the instrument (Form A and B) and the criterion measure were positive, though low. Therefore, there seemed to be a general positive trend of systematic relationship between what the instrument attempted to measure and the measure of the same variable yielded by the teacher-rating. The instrument, with further research, offered a valid measure of achievement motivation with which the highly motivated and the poorly motivated adolescents can be identified.