A total of 199 students from a school in Hong Kong responded to 25 items in a survey. Principal components analysis found 4 school motivation factors consistent with the Task, Effort, Competitivenes and Praise scales of the McInerney et al. Inventory of School Motivation, 1 education aspiration factor and 1 career aspiration factor. The correlations indicated significant relations between the motivation factors and the aspiration factors. A path model applying a structural equation modeling approach found that Task, Effort and Competitiveness orientations had relatively stronger impacts on education aspirations whereas Task and Praise had stronger impacts on career aspirations. Analysis of variance found that grade 7 students had significantly higher Task, Effort and Praise scores and higher career aspirations than students from grades 9 and 11. The drastic drop from grade 7 of motivation scores--especially Task and Effort, both pertaining to a mastery orientation dimension that has been assumed to be a major driving force for excellence-calls for urgent attention to student motivation in junior secondary classes.
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Using confirmatory factor analysis this study examines the cross-cultural generalizability of the factor structure for the Inventory of School Motivation (ISM), an instrument based on Personal Investment theory. The instrument consists of eight different scales with 43 survey items (ranging from 3 to 7 items each) and each reflecting one of eight specific dimensions: task, effort, competition, social power, affiliation, social concern, praise, and token. The factor structure was invariant over large samples of responses by Anglo-Australian (n=2,616), Migrant Australian (n=1,265), Aboriginal Australian (n=906), Hong Kong Chinese (n=697), Navajo (n=1,776), Anglo-American (n=884) and African (n=819) cultural groups of high school students. The results of factorial invariance analysis indicated that the ISM has a stable and reliable factor structure among the 7 cultural groups. Findings also provide evidence that the ISM scales are applicable to students of different cultural backgrounds; meaningful cross-cultural comparisons should use the 43 items in educational settings.
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Recent studies in the late 1990s have led researchers argued that performance goals can be split up into performance- approach and performance-avoidance goals and that performance goals are not totally maladaptive in learning. Research of the trichotonomous goals framework by Elliot, McGregor and Gable (1999) found that mastery goals are positive predictors of deep processing, performance - approach goals are positive predictors of surface processing and exam performance, and performance-avoidance goals are positive predictors of surface processing and negative predictors of deep performance and exam performance. The present study examined a structural model outlining the relationship of the three achievement goals, learning strategies and achievement of Hong Kong secondary students. The model was confirmed by LISREL with satisfactory goodness of fit index. The results showed that mastery goals were significantly and positively related to deep learning strategy but negatively related to surface strategy. Both performance- approach and avoidance goals were significantly related to surface strategy. Both mastery goals and performance - approach goals were significantly and positively related to academic achievement but performance-avoidance goals were significantly and negatively related to achievement.
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