Mapping Motivation Cost in Physical Education: Validating a Psychometric Instrument

ABSTRACT

Derived from the Expectancy-Value Theory (EVT) model, cost has drawn scholarly interest for being predicative of avoidance motivation. The study is an effort to develop and validate an instrument to measure students’ perceived costs in physical education. Through literature review and student interviews, a draft of 39 items under seven domains was developed for content validation. A total of 29 items were sent to collect psychometric evidence from two samples of 6^th to 8^th grade middle school students, age 11 to 15. Exploratory factor analyses (EFA) were applied on the first sample and yielded a three-factor construct to measure social costs (six items), physical costs (five items), and loss of valuable alternatives (five items). with item loadings ranging from .48 to .73. Following confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) applied on the second student sample confirmed the construct with satisfactory fitting indexes.

KEYWORDS:

• Costs
• expectancy-value theory
• psychometric instrument
• physical education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Or mathematics, language arts, etc., depending on the content of research.