Psychometric assessment of the Instructional Materials Motivation Survey (IMMS) instrument in a remote learning environment

Abstract

Introduction: Motivation contributes greatly to learning, being a predictor of student performance. Thus, instruments that assess motivation after exposure to different teaching strategies and materials can contribute to the analysis and decision on its effectiveness. In this sense, the Instructional Materials Motivation Survey (IMMS) instrument measures students’ motivation after instructional activities. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the evidence of validity of the IMMS, previously translated and cross-culturally adapted to Brazilian Portuguese. Method: Cross-sectional study used to evaluate the psychometric properties of the IMMS questionnaire, applied to 211 students from the first, third and fourth semesters of the medical course at José do Rosário Vellano University (Unifenas - Campus Belo Horizonte). The principal component analysis (PCA) with Varimax rotation and Cronbach’s alpha coefficient were used to assess the validity and reliability of the instrument. Results: The PCA reduced the instrument’s items from 36 to 25 items, distributed in four dimensions. The saturation of the items in the dimensions ranged from 0.529 to 0.790 and the total explained variance was 63.12%. The reliability of the modified IMMS (IMMS-BRV), measured by Cronbach’s alpha, ranged from 0.76 (Attention dimension) to 0.93 (Interest dimension). Conclusion: The IMMS application in the remote education scenario, through asynchronous video lectures of human anatomy, resulted in an alternative instrument (IMMS-BRV), with fewer items (more parsimonious) and good internal consistency, demonstrating preliminary evidence of its validity and reliability adequacy.

Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Students’ Motivation in Relation to Asynchronous Anatomy Video Lectures

“…Subsequently, its psychometric validation generated the IMMS version validated in Brazil (IMMS-BRV), consisting of 25 items divided into four dimensions: Interest, Confidence, Attention, and Expectation (Online Resource 1 ). The internal consistency reliability, measured by Cronbach’s alpha coefficient, for the complete IMMS-BRV instrument, is 0.95, being 0.93 for the Interest dimension, 0.87 for the Confidence dimension, 0.76 for the Attention dimension and 0.78 for the Expectation dimension [ 35 , 36 ]. Its purpose is to measure the respondent’s motivation using the Likert scale, with the following score: (1) I totally disagree; (2) I partially disagree; (3) I neither disagree nor agree; (4) I partially agree; and (5) I totally agree.…”