Validating the Inventory of School Motivation with Mainland Chinese Students

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to validate the Inventory of School Motivation (ISM) (Mainland China), which was developed specifically for use with Mainland Chinese students. Development of the instrument was grounded in personal investment theory and built on the ISM instrument, which has been shown to accurately tap the achievement goal constructs hypothesized by the theory. Our data analysis indicated that the subscales in our instrument do represent dimensions associated with achievement goals: task, effort, competition, social power, affiliation, social concern, praise, and token. Participants were 458 undergraduates from five universities in eastern China. A series of nested confirmatory factor analyses supported a multidimensional school motivation structure. The results indicated both convergent and concurrent validity for the instrument with Mainland students. Relationships were found between ISM goal constructs and global motivation goals, family-oriented goals, self-concepts, and learning approaches. Our findings support that Mainland Chinese students' achievement goal orientation is consistent with that found in other cultures, suggesting that the instrument and the theory that informs it may further cross-cultural research in this area. At the same time, though, our findings show that Mainland students endorse some goal orientations differently from other groups, suggesting an inventory instrument specific to Mainland China is both important and necessary.Keywords: achievement motivation, personal investment theory, inventory of school Motivation, cross-cultural studies, instrument validation inTrODUcTiOn There is growing recognition that culture influences achievement motivation. Guay (2016) argues that learners' motivation "is not based solely on such intrapersonal factors as innate characteristics, but also on contexts (including cultural ones) in which students are supposed to develop their competencies. Thus, the cultural context is expected to shape motivation (i.e., cultural specificity)" (p. 157). Western concepts of achievement motivation, however, have been applied to diverse groups without reference to differences in culture, an approach that can mischaracterize the true nature of achievement motivation in different groups (Maehr and McInerney, 2004). Empirical evidence is building to show that findings drawn from culturally neutral studies may not accurately describe the true nature of achievement motivation in diverse groups (e.g., Maehr and Nicholls, 1980;McInerney et al., 1997;Bempechat and Drago-Severson, 1999;Salili and Hoosain, 2002;Guay, 2016;Lam et al., 2016). Researchers have shown specific interest studying motivation in Asian cultures. Studies in this area report that some Asian groups differ from their Western counterparts in the way they construe self, others, and the interdependence of the two (Markus and Kitayama, 1991;Li, 2002;Chang et al., 2003;Ho and Hau, 2008;Cheng and Lam, 2013). Previous research has characterized these differences as being collectivist and individual...

The contribution of personal investment theory of motivation in second language acquisition

“…These patterns represent cultural-related motivational scopes. Indeed, PI emphasizes the subjective meaning that individuals make of achievement situations, which is a reflection of their cultural-related belief systems [ 22 ]. According to Ref.…”