The Student Motivation Scale: A Tool for Measuring and Enhancing Motivation

This week I read The Student Motivation Scale: A Tool for Measuring and Enhancing Motivation by A.J. Martin. Read HERE.

This is research which focuses on creating a tool to measure students’ motivation. 

The researcher divides factors that contribute to motivation or decrease the motivation into boosters and guzzers respectively. Boosters are the factors that  enhance motivation and achievement measured through persistence, planning and monitoring. Guzzers are factors that reduce motivation and achievement behavior through anxiety, low control, avoidance and self-sabotage.

What struck me?

As measuring motivation is a complex matter it was interesting to look at it from a multidimensional point of view. 

According to the research, boosters are divided into Booster Thoughts and Booster Behaviors. Booster Thoughts are self-belief (If I try hard I can do my school work well), value of schooling (how much students believe that what they learn at school is relevant and important in their life) and learning focus (ability to work hard, learn more, enjoy learning). The Booster Behaviors are persistence, planning and monitoring (when I begin homework or an assignment I get it clear in my head what it is that I need to do).

Guzzers are the following:

Low control – students are low in control if they are unsure about how to do well or how to avoid doing poorly and feel helpless when doing their schoolwork. 

Avoidance focus – “The main reason I work at school is because I don’t want to get a bad mark or get in trouble.”

Self-sabotage– “I tend to avoid studying when an exam or test is coming up. ” Students do things that reduce their chances of success at school. They put off doing the assignments and do not try to do hard and difficult work. 

Martin also created a tool in the form of a questionnaire to measure students’ motivation according to the factors described above. 

Understanding how to measure motivation is one of the main questions on my radar as I am thinking of working on the conditions that foster high motivation for learning. But to begin with,  what are the tools to measure motivation?

Viktoriia Simakova