Miranda, I do not know of one tied to the topic of science education, but over the years have seen (and have had doctoral students work with) such instruments of measure in other topics. I realize you would probably have to run some power of test etc. if you revised one of those questionnaires. Just a thought.

Dear Max, I have searched. But I could only read free abstracts, not the full text. You know one of my problems in research is that I don't have a grant, and still love doing research!

@Patrick: I can translate anything from English to Malay and vice versa. Do you have a softcopy? Please send, I will use it if suitable.....

Excellent, Patrick, that was the kind of instrument I was thinking of. I believe modifying will be fine, in some cases copyrights apply, but that one might be out of copyright. If it is still in copyright, permission can be requested from the holder.

@Patrick and friends, thanks, I will check out and get back soon. I'm still in a meeting.

I came across a questionnaire on student's motivation in learning English Language Skills. I will try to search it for you Miranda.

THANKS. Maxim, the JRST and the IJSE papers are just the ones that I need. Thanks very much, all of you :)

Really Boris is right, RG isn't just for general discussions. It's where we get help. Thanks.

Pre-College Recruiting Surveys, Developed by The Pennsylvania State University and University of Missouri, Funded by The National Science Foundation (HRD 0120642 and HRD 0607081) http://www.engr.psu.edu/awe/misc/research.aspx

LAESE measures self-efficacy of undergraduate students studying engineering or high school students. Items address the following aspects of self-efficacy.

- Student efficacy in “barrier” situations

- Outcomes expected from studying engineering

- Student expectations about work load

- Student process of choosing a major

- Student coping strategies in difficult situations.

- Career exploration

- Influence of role models on study and career decisions

Easy registration and there are multiple surveys available for free use, as long as properly referenced.

I have n't but one of my professor has been working on similar line. I will ask him.

Thanks dear friends. Continue to post (especially Sahifa, Vukica and Amir), our RG members will surely appreciate all this :)

Why not try to develop your own questionnaire and try to test it on a small number of students. Then compare with a standard or validated one.

Miranda,

To study motivation in educational contexts, we used questionnaires based on the Self-Determination Theory (SDT), developed by scholars such as Vallerand, Deci and Ryan.

@Vukica, thanks a lot. I was especially interested in engineering students. AWE/STEM is available free of charge. It is a good fact for us in Serbia!

@Maxim, I am going to follow the links You have given. Good sources for further work on evaluation of student motivation for science learning!

@Miranda, useful thread! thanks!

Dear Miranda

I made an adaptation of my scale for science. I hope it can help you

Best regards

Dear Miranda

I made an adaptation of my scale for science. I hope it can help you

Best regards

Dear friends, thanks very much.

@Fathi, it's a good idea. But I will gather a few questionnaires, then choose.

@ Javier, please send a copy or a link that I can get in.

@Nelson, thanks. I will check it out, tomorrow morning. My time now is near 8pm, but for you, it's still day time.

Sent from mobile.

This is one of them. The questionnaire is at the end of the article. It has been internationally used, but it is not specific for science.

Hi Miranda

You are getting plenty to choose from.

Attached is an instrument the main purpose i of which in the original form (CEPSATI) was to obtain data on how school students interpreted the classroom atmosphere of new teachers during their probationary period. This version (SCEPSATI) was adapted for science classes. Might be useful for adapting to assessing student perceptions, though it was used with younger people.

Feel free to use it or adapt it to your particular needs.

Forgot to attach it!!

@Javier, Colin, thanks very much.

Sent from mobile.

@Javier, Colin, thanks very much.

Sent from mobile.

Dear Miranda Yeoh, I've recently developed a research on this theme. Please give me your email so I can send you some interesting material! Best regards.

Dear Friends, thanks. Today I manage to download and print many questionnaires! This will be a useful thread for anyone who wants to study motivation.

@Ljubomir, it seems like we are going to have more interests, and more skills.

@Javier, Nelson, Colin et al., THANKS for sharing your resources.

Friends, I found 3 papers that MAY be useful for my review. This weekend, I have some holidays in conjunction with Chinese New Year. So besides the festivities, I will do some serious reading (when the guests have gone home.

The papers that I found are by Holbrook, Lavonen and Keith Postlethwaite.

If you KNOW of others, please share. THANKS.

@Marina: my email is below. Thanks :)

[email protected] OR

[email protected]

Dear friends: Pavel is rather busy, and cannot collaborate on this research with me. He has written to me, as below. WHO would like to? We do it for our country; and as a joint RG activity. Please let me know.

'Dear Miranda,

I have looked up my schedule once again, and I am not sure if I can be helpful colleague for your research on motivation right now. My major interest in PhD program is engineering and physics oriented, while I try to learn about professional teaching in my spare time. Today, my advisers gave me another task that is of high priority for me.

Nevertheless, I will try to help you as much as I can by sharing my knowledge, replying to your posts, looking for papers that can be useful for your research.

I would really love to collaborate with you, and I hope that we will do that in not far future.'

I have one, specific for intrinsic motivation in learning

Dear friends, since we now have this materials on motivation for science learning, can we collaborate on it? If you wish to study the motivation of your college or university students, I think it's fine. Let me know what you think. Let's keep the study simple :)

@Alias, thanks. Please share, as our other friends have done.

Sorry Patrick. It's a professional work and it has to be done by staff within my college. Things are done very formally in this country. Collaborating with people on RG is fine. Yet my study must be able to 'stand alone' as a research on students of my college.

@Friends, thanks all of you. I have holidays till Sunday for the Chinese New Year break, but I still have the mobile to read your interesting posts.

For checking the students' motivation for learning science, questionnaire can be prepared by oneself! We can ask leading questions in which their inclination towards, curiosity towards natural events, their urge to know more about anything or draw pictures to explain things or draw pathways etc. It may not be very professional but sometimes we may stumble upon some exclusive questions 😄

Of course, if we are designing our own--and I agree with Jaya--we will have to do at least a small study to test it out for reliability and be prepared to describe the data in an appendix of the study in which it is used.

I agree with Jaya and Max...in my opinion, we may use other people's questionnaire.. but their context will not be the same with ours..especially in different regions like us..ASEAN countries... where science is always perceived as the second foreign language after english. To validate a translated version is already a PhD study for some..dont you think? I'm designing my own for Year 9 students... i need to get 2 3 schools to check its reliability and validity of just 12 items, because some schools here has only a class taking at least two sciences.

Dear All,

I have compared the entomological knowledge of my students with that of Maria Sibylla Merian (1639). I called it Merian test. https://www.researchgate.net/post/Would_you_like_to_try_the_Merian_test

Certainly, M.S. Merian won.

@Jaya, Max, Fatimah, Andras, thanks. Dear folks, I am back from the normal round of Chinese new year visitation. I have to be efficient and not be too long in an environment of eating, snacking and gambling, right?

Hooray, I am back at RG.

Sent from mobile.

@Javier, I will go through those articles on the questionnaires thoroughly.

@Javier. I have gone through the 2 articles on questionnaires: IJSE and JRST. Please do the same and tell me what you think. We will agree to use same questionnaire, same research questions. Then each one of us will write up a report concerning our own institition. We can publish that in our own name. So we are quite independent. Finally, I can write up a comparative article with both our names, and we try to get it published in an international journal, acknowledging RG and our good friends (like Ljubomir, Max, Tolga, Hanno, Hussin, Michael, Ravi, Prof. Ravi, Boris, Ganesh, Naveen, Prof. Tan etc etc. .....)

Please give your ideas here. Open to good ideas.

Sent from mobile.

Miranda:

Both questionnaires (articles) are very interesting. One for college students and the other one for high school students.

From my point of view, the possible strength of our study would be to compare the results of students from different communities/ethnicities/countries regarding "science learning interest". I am from Spain (Europe) and you are from Malaysia (Asia). Any other researches from other countries/ethnicities interested?

A second issue would be: why we want to conduct this research work. Goals, aims....

My own main goal is also Intrinsic Motivation. But I have other aims. My students say that I motivate them, I'm really touched. My deputy director tells me to scold the lazy ones. But it's better to motivate them, and be very transparent. They appreciate it.

Between the 2 questionnaires (qnn), I like JRST for these reasons:the age is near k12,

Permission to use it is given ALREADY,

Factor loading values are great,

It avoids 'no opinion' , as in IJSE. (So, we use JRST, what do you say?)

I have to visit my old lecturers and professors. Get back to work on Tuesday or Wedn.

(Life is hard without a PC. Sent from mobile. )

@Javier Have a look at this website http://roseproject.no/about/rose-brief.html.

The project invites many countries to be involved. You can check how they lay out the aims and objectives.

We are only limited by the length of the article that a journal is happy to accept and the length a reader can read, with concentration. So we keep it simple, just a few research questions, and just a few countries, that I may be able to compare meaningfully.

Recently I sent a paper to a journal. The maximum length was 5000 words, but I kept my paper brief, because the guide lines included 'who reads overlong articles anyway?'

The original questtionnaire is developed by Pintrinch. You can modified it to suit with the learning science context

Thanks for the link Fatimah. It looks like a great project. However, the questionnaire is way too long. I agree with Miranda, we need shorter assessment instruments. The one included in the JRST is perfect (The SMTSL questionnaire).

The second goal would be to find researchers from different countries/communities/ethnicities with access to secondary education students willing to participate.

No problem @javier. So, @miranda and @javier, who are you looking for in this joint - collaboration effort? And what must we have to be involved?

Fatimah: two basic conditions: you must have access to a large population of secondary education students and willing to traslate the SMTSL questionnaire to your native language (Miranda please, correct me if I am wrong).

According to me Miranda,

To measure the motivation of students to study science is to make a headcount.

In my country's universities, more students study human and art sciences than natural sciences, mathematics and applied (technical sciences). That's the classical pattern whether the student is a girl or a boy of 18 years old.

What has changed strongly is that female students have become or are becoming a majority in many academic disciplines, including more or less in natural and engineering.sciences.

That seems to be a trend which will keep on going for some time I figger. And I consider that as very positive. Nobody in my country will (still) say that women don't have technical or mathematical skills. On the contrary.

So this means that women in my country are much more motivated or maybe better are not withheld any more to study for civil engineer, architect, mathematician, and so on. They are taking the places they deserve now, simply based on their study results.

And how do we know that? By the headcount. The headcount demonstrates that females or girls are much more motivated (and not withheld) to study technological, or natural sciences.

When I was a student that was completely different except for biology. That was the first natural science where emancipation had already taken place. In the technical sciences bio-engineering was the first to become fully emancipated soon after. Now Belgian girls can study what they are most motivated for. Good.

And we could map these evolutions based on simple headcounts!

If you want to dig deeper into motivation, whether girls or boys, I am not sure whether a questionnaire will for example dig up the fact that girls, 40 years ago in my country, which was then very catholic, were actually sometimes forbidden to study certain disciplines at universities, and sometimes not even stimulated to opt for an academic career at all. Girls belonged at home at the cooking stove.

This time has past now. Catholicism and Christianity in Europe, is just faintly what they have been, and women, by wonder, have taken the places in society on which they have a right as much as men. Good.

Do we need a questionnaire to know whether emancipation has taken place in a society or not? I doubt it.

What exactly do you want to investigate then with respect to motivation Miranda. Apparently something else than the impact of emancipation on the academic option for women, clearly. There is evidently more to say about motivation than the impact emancipation has had on the number of girls at universities and the disciplines they studied. For one thing there is also something like the social class one is born in. That will require a questionnaire I guess,.... or a visit to town hall, with a permit to check which profession a students' parents have. In that case you don't need a questionnaire either. So?

Cheers,

Frank

@Javier, you are right on most things. Only the qnn in JRST is called SMQ II.

@Frank, perhaps for experienced researchers like you, many things are just not necessary, but for small flies like me, they are needed.

Tomorrow, after visiting my old professors, I will go back to work :)

Sent from mobile.

Thanks Md Samsudin. Pintrich, 2003, is within the refs :)

The questionnaire is fine. My students can understand it very well, thanks to PPSMI, but I will still translate. I'm used to all that. For my PhD, I translated Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, validated it and used it. Thanks again :)

Sent from mobile.

Glad to hear that.

Hello friends, I am in the process of translating SMQ II into Malay.

It will be good if we have researchers from US, India, Russia, Africa in this work. So please think about it and let us know. Are you willing to translate the questionnaire and check its reliability as well?

We are transparent about our intentions. Thanks.

I am willing to participate Miranda. I am from Spain and I have access to secondary education students.

Thanks Javier! Let' s get on with the work. There's lots to do :)

ROSE was an international questionnaire study focusing on 15-year-olds' attitutes to and interest for different aspects of science education.

Background and questionnaire can be found on: http://www.uv.uio.no/ils/english/research/projects/rose/actadidactica.pdf

Overall results:

http://www.cemf.ca/%5C/PDFs/SjobergSchreinerOverview2010.pdf

Thanks Jesper :)

@Javier,

What's your progress at this moment? Last week, I got formal permission from my Director to carry out this study, only among my own students this semester (N = 143). That means I don't really need students' or parents' consent.

I will get back when I have more to share. Please share your progress here, or you may send a message through RG. RG will be happy about this collaborative effort :)

Miranda:

I am currently translating the SMQ II into Spanish. I also have a sample of Spanish high school students willing to participate.

Javier et al., I hope we can have another person, from India, perhaps? We stick to just 2 main research questions that we have discussed, but if you want a comparison between science majors and non majors, it's fine. But for me, I will keep it simple, like most of my papers :)

Anyone else from India, etc keen to join us?

Darasingh, perhaps you can access the K12 students?

@Javier et al.,

Dear friends, the 2 main research questions are:

Q1. How is a student's achievement in Science related to Motivation?

Q2. What similarities and differences exist between male and female students in achievement and motivation?

And for the comparative purpose the research question is:

Q3. What similarities and differences are there between Motivation to study science among students in countries A, B, and C?

This is SIMPLE, right? Your views are welcome :)

Greetings from Pakistan,

I am student of MEd, from Notre Dame Institute of Karachi, Pakistan.

I m looking for an article and researcher who can give me permission to adapt his/her tool "Students Motivational Questionnaire" for my MEd study.

My topic of quantitative research is "Impact of teaching methodology on the level of interest to study physics among students at secondary level in schools of Karachi, Pakistan."

It will be a great help for me if anyone can refer me an article with tool along with permission to use it, as it is ethical consideration. I will acknowledge name of researcher in my study.

Your co-operation will be highly appreciated.

I look forward to hearing from you.

God Bless You

Zehra Habib

Dear Zehra, you are welcome to use the SMQ II. Permission is give by the authors Glynn et al. to CHANGE the word 'science' to Biology, or Chemistry or Physics :))

On RG, most of us (although unfortunately not all) are GREAT collaborators! Welcome to my thread :)

Dear Miranda Yeoh,

Thank you very much to share your thoughts and welcome me in your thread.

I am also thankful that you allow me the tool. But for my research, I need to refer that article as well as writer. If you send me link of article in which Students' Motivation Questionnaire is used, then i can show it to my teacher and satisfy him that I have permission to use tool.

I would be good if you send the email adress of yours and Glynn et al.

Thank you

God Bless You

I am travelling a few days to do some work for my college. The questionnaire is for science subjects. If your research is in that area it's fine to use the questionnaire. Just wait a short while. Thanks.

Sent from mobile.

Dear Miranda,

Thank you so much for helping me out. My research be will be with students of Grade 7 and 8 in area of physics. I want to determine level of their interest in physics with the help of Students' Motivation Questionnaire. I do not have questionnaire which you are using. My teacher instruct me that I need to have tool with permission of research then I can adapt it.

It will be no problem, I can wait for you.

Wish you best of luck!

Thank You

Dear Zehra,

This is the questionnaire that Javier and I are using. Would you like to join our research? We are using pre university students and the research questions in my post above. If you want to use other samples, perhaps you can get students who are close to our age groups. My students are around 17-19 years old.

Can you translate it into your language and run the reliability test?

This paper tells us clearly that validity tests have been carried out.

http://www.coe.uga.edu/smq/files/2011/10/Glynn-et-al-2011.pdf

(I just got back from my travelling, and haven't even gone home; came back to office straightaway.)

Dear Miranda,

I hope your travelling was good and am very happy to see your reply.

I am very thankful to you that you have invited me to come to join your research. I am willing to work with your project. But I need time to join you as I m doing Masters of Education as a regular program. Because of regular task I could not able to manage time with other task.

But I am making sure that from June I will be free and will join you to work with you. Also I will share finding of my research with you. I will work with Grade 7 and 8 students in schools.

I am also very glad to inform you that I got permission to use "science motivation questionnaire" from Glynn et al. I am very thankful to as I got success to take permission because of your support.

I am presenting my proposal on 5th March, 2013.

Thank you

Great! Take your time, Zehra :)

Dear Miranda

I am very keen to participate in your collaborative research on students. Its a nice plan to improve the teaching learning process. I am from India and teaching medical graduates.

Dear Kusum,

Are you teaching a basic science subject? Originally, Javier and I have agreed to use pre univ students. Try to get students around 17-19 years, otherwise, we can only report. But we may not be able to compare meaningfully. You need to translate the questionnaire into your native language and run reliability test.

Our research questions are on this thread. You are welcome to our research.

Dear Miranda Yeoh

Yes, I am very much agreed with your opinion that being a faculty member teaching is most important along with research in university/college.

Dear Ayaz, Kusum, Zehra, Javier et al.,

The questionnaire is for science, not for clinical medicine subjects. If we want to use it for Pharmacology (example only) we may need approval. Thanks AYAZ for support :))

Miranda:

If you want, I can arrange for a friend to apply to a class here in Brazil. It will be an honor!

Thanks Alexandre. But I don't need too many participants, only because the final article cannot be too long.

If it's you, yourself, it's fine. You are welcome if you will translate the questionnaire, do the reliability tests, as the rest of us are doing. (On this thread, we are transparent and collaborative.)

Miranda:

Can I join? I am handling students within your age group. I think it will be a good information (data) coming from a developing country and a not-so-good in international ranking (ex. TIMSS data). I can provide you science and non science major students with about a population of 200+.

Hi Elmer,

You can join, but we have progressed quite a lot. Are you willing to translate the questionnaire into your native language, and run the reliability? Each one of us will try to publish our part, in a local journal. And we will pool our work and we write up 1 comparative research article.

I am keying in data for this project; while re-writing another paper. I have learnt from the active people on RG to work on several things and have several papers in the pipeline :)

Dear friends, I have updated the question. I may need to update from time to time, as we progress along. How is your progress: Javier, Zehra and Kusum? Please reply on this thread, rather than sending message to my inbox because I tend to miss them at times. Thanks.

@ Miranda. I think I can do it. Translating it to native language. Wait, do you mean into our mother tongue? or the national language which is considered our second language already. another, what statistical tool did you use to measure its reliability? Do we have to use similar tool or not? Please let me join. I want to experience the process of collaborative research through here. Thanks in advance.

Elmer. you are welcome. We just work hard, maybe in a few months we can finish...

Dear friends, how are you all progressing in your work on student motivation? I've analyzed the data, and I will start the writing as soon as I can. Hope to get good news of your progress :))

I translated the questionnaire, but I am still gathering data.

Thanks Javier. Keep up the good job, and inform me. Thanks :)

Ok, I will. Tomorrow I will have around 60 questionnaires filled. I hope to finish next week.

There are some suggestions for the improvment.

http://busyteacher.org/6943-teachers-top-10-ways-to-motivate-students.html

Thanks Ayaz, I will get into it. It's not possible now, being maintained...

Friends, I have analysed the data. It seems to be running parallel to the results by Glynn et al. Now I must get down to writing. But a lot of reading is also needed. How are you getting on Javier et al? Anything to share?

We are currently on Easter Break. I have collected around 90 questionnaires. I will finish collecting questionnaires after the break.

Thanks. When you have done the analyses: reliability, t-tests etc, please attach the results to my email:

[email protected]

Ok

Hello Miranda

Can I join this interesting research project at this level?

Dear Kusum, did I say NO to anyone who wants to join? But please go through this thread, and be ready to work very hard. Javier and I have translated our questionnaire into native language and carried out the research. The writing up is difficult. But first, each of us will submit to a journal our own part and publish in our own name. Then only we pool together and I will combine the data of our PUBLISHED papers.

Dear friends, I am just starting to write up this report although I analysed the stats some time ago. I was held back for some time on my research on independent learning, because I thought I should re-do it, improving the methodology.

But independent learning has relationship with motivation. It's the motivated students who desire to be autonomous learners. So I might as well do the two together, just as I did the writing up for collaborative learning and music mnemonics together.

Friends, it's better to do one thing at a time, and have less load on our working memory. But sometimes, it just has to be done.

Dear Miranda, you didn't gave negative answer but I thought that how to join the project when it has been already started and completed by some of the members?

Just let me know your research plan in detail.

Dear Kusum, Earlier on, I thought you joined us and had made some progress. I believe it's never too late to start, and I don't ever discourage anyone :)

Dear friends, I have written up my paper. Now I want to publish it. Please do the same, then after that I will write a comparative paper of our work. All the best. My problem is to find a free journal in Sc education, preferably with IF... any info on this?

Dear Miranda,

perhaps you could provide a version of your paper to the RG community.