Measuring Motivation in Educational Settings: A Case for Pragmatic Measurement
Item
Title
Measuring Motivation in Educational Settings: A Case for Pragmatic Measurement
Abstract/Description
A reality of conducting motivation research in educational settings is that there are tensions between technical standards of research and practical constraints of a given situation. Although adherence to standards for high-quality measurement is critical for good-quality data to be collected, measurement also requires substantial resources to ensure quality. In the current chapter, we discuss several examples of real data collected in different educational settings using a pragmatic measurement framework. Based on contemporary measurement perspectives, the pragmatic measurement framework emphasizes building evidence-based arguments to support the use and interpretation of a measure. Example 1 explores college students’ attitudes toward general education classes. Example 2 tracks students’ classroom motivation over several time points. Example 3 assesses experimental differences from an online motivation intervention. Together the three examples cover a range of possible research questions that researchers may encounter. As a whole, this chapter demonstrates that important and meaningful insights can be gained using pragmatic approaches to measurement. Importantly, we discuss the trade-offs that researchers or other measure users must consider when adopting a pragmatic approach to measurement.
Author/creator
Date
In publication
Pages
713-738
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Resource type
Research/Scholarly Media
Resource status/form
Published Text
Manuscript
Scholarship genre
Empirical
IRE Approach/Concept
Open access/full-text available
Yes
ISBN
978-1-107-17793-2
URL
Citation
Kosovich, J. J., Hulleman, C. S., & Barron, K. E. (2019). Measuring Motivation in Educational Settings: A Case for Pragmatic Measurement. In K. A. Renninger & S. E. Hidi (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning (pp. 713–738). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316823279.030
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