Validation of an instrument to measure students’ motivation and self-regulation towards technology learning

Abstract

Background:

Few studies have examined students’ attitudinal perceptions of technology. There is no appropriate instrument to measure senior high school students’ motivation and self-regulation toward technology learning among the current existing instruments in the field of technology education.

Purpose:

The present study is to validate an instrument for assessing senior high school students’ motivation and self-regulation towards technology learning.

Sample:

A total of 1822 Taiwanese senior high school students (1020 males and 802 females) responded to the newly developed instrument.

Design and method:

The Motivation and Self-regulation towards Technology Learning (MSRTL) instrument was developed based on the previous instruments measuring students’ motivation and self-regulation towards science learning. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were utilized to investigate the structure of the items. Cronbach’s alpha was applied for measuring the internal consistency of each scale. Furthermore, multivariate analysis of variance was used to examine gender differences.

Results:

Seven scales, including ‘Technology learning self-efficacy,’ ‘Technology learning value,’ ‘Technology active learning strategies,’ ‘Technology learning environment stimulation,’ ‘Technology learning goal-orientation,’ ‘Technology learning self-regulation-triggering,’ and ‘Technology learning self-regulation-implementing’ were confirmed for the MSRTL instrument. Moreover, the results also showed that male and female students did not present the same degree of preference in all of the scales.

Conclusions:

The MSRTL instrument composed of seven scales corresponding to 39 items was shown to be valid based on validity and reliability analyses. While male students tended to express more positive and active performance in the motivation scales, no gender differences were found in the self-regulation scales.

Keywords:

• motivation towards technology learning
• self-regulation towards technology learning
• instrument development

Acknowledgements

The authors express their gratitude to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments about this paper.

Funding

This study was supported by the National Science Council, Taiwan under grant numbers [NSC 100-2514-S-008-001-], [NSC 101-2514-S-008-001-], and [NSC 102-2514-S-008-001-].