Measuring student motivation in Rwanda: development and validation of a self-report instrument

15th February 2021 : 12:45 - 14:00

Category: Webinar

Research Group: Quantitative Methods Hub

Speaker: Dominik Bulla, University of Oxford

Location: Zoom webinar, registration required

Convener: Lars-Erik Malmberg

Audience: Public

Please register ahead of the webinar at this link.

One potential reason that motivational research around education has never picked up in Africa may be that locally grounded measurement scales hardly exist. This presentation is about the design, implementation, and results of an attempt to develop and validate a motivational self-report instrument for the Rwandan context. Within the first study, motivational drivers of educational engagement of Rwandan students were scoped out through qualitative methods. Results were also used to develop self-report measures. Within the second study, the internal structure of the motivational scales was tested through exploratory factor analysis. An emerging 4-factor solution of self-beliefs, utility, costs, and unimportance fitted the data within both the maths and language domain. Within the third study, confirmatory factor analyses supported the four-factor structure of the scales, and suggested measurement invariance especially across gender, age, and academic domain. Finally, the motivational factor structure is compared especially with the ones from the Western-borne literature.