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

• Main Author: De Sousa, Jovita Francisco
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 1977
• Subjects: Motivation in education; Motivation (Psychology); Educational Psychology
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/416; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7254&context=etd_masteral
• Institution: De La Salle University

Since motivation plays such an important role not only in impelling action for learning but also eventually in determining the kind and the amount of learning that takes place, it is important for educators to be able to assess the strength of that variable in their educands. At present there are no definite and simple tools that assess the motivation of adolescents to achieve in school. This study was an attempt to develop further such a device: an objective-projective measure of achievement motivation that can quickly and easily identify between highly and poorly motivated students. It investigates whether a modified form of the instrument developed by Abraham Mattakottil (1976) is capable of measuring motivation to achieve in school, among adolescents from various cultures. Out of the 630 students, coming from 24 schools in 6 Asian countries, a modified form of the objective-projective device constructed by Abraham Mattakottil (1976) and a Teacher Rating Scale of School-Motivated Behaviors, also developed by the same author, were used. Then, an item analysis was done to assess the characteristics of the instrument. From the total sample of 630, the upper 27% and the lower 27% were separated and formed into two groups consisting of 170 subjects each. Each item was then analyzed and its difficulty level, discrimination power and quality of options determined. Employed also was the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient to determine the correlation with the criterion measure and the correlation coefficients between scores on each category of responses and the total test scores, for the whole sample and for each country. The test of significance of r was then done, by computing the value of t, and eventually, scores of the subjects from the different countries were grouped and compared, by means of t-tests, to determine whether there were significant differences across cultures.