Work in progress: Assessing engineering students' motivation and learning strategies-a psychometric analysis of the motivated strategies for learning questionnaire

Abstract

This work in progress seeks to examine the psychometric analysis of the motivated strategies for learning questionnaire (MSLQ) for assessing engineering students' motivation and learning strategies. Although there are many standardized questionnaires used to assess student motivation to learn, the MSLQ is one of the more widely used in general education research and has been reported to be reliable and valid. However, it has rarely been used in engineering education. The entire instrument comprises 81 items assessing motivation and learning strategies related constructs, with the motivation and learning strategies comprising six and nines sub-scales respectively. Constructs on the instrument are assessed on a 7-point Likert scale and scores are determined by obtaining participants mean score for items on each sub-scales. Confirmatory factor models were used to examine the performance of the MSLQ scales with the engineering student data. Preliminary findings show that the model fit was good to excellent for each sub-scale.