TY - JOUR

T1 - Who likes to learn new things: measuring adult motivation to learn with PIAAC data from 21 countries

AU - Gorges, Julia

AU - Maehler, Débora

AU - Koch, Tobias

AU - Offenhaus, Judith

N1 - Funding Information: Work on this paper was supported by the College for Interdisciplinary Educational Research (CIDER), a Joint Initiative of the BMBF, the Jacobs Foundation and the Leibniz Association. The data used have been provided by the Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS), the OECD (Public Use Files) and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (Australian Public Use File). This paper has been presented at the 8th Biennnal SELF Conference, 20–24 August 2015 in Kiel, Germany, and at the 1st International CIDER Conference, 24–26 January 2016, Berlin, Germany. Publisher Copyright: © 2016, Gorges et al.

PY - 2016/12/1

Y1 - 2016/12/1

N2 - BackgroundDespite the importance of lifelong learning as a key to individual and societal prosperity, we know little about adult motivation to engage in learning across the lifespan. Building on educational psychological approaches, this article presents a measure of Motivation-to-Learn using four items from the background questionnaire of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC).MethodsWe used multiple-group confirmatory factor analyses for ordered categorical data to investigate the scale's dimensionality and measurement invariance across countries. Regression analyses were used to investigate the scale's criterion validity.ResultsResults show that the proposed four-item scale fits the data considerably better than the original six-item scale labeled Readiness-to-Learn. Further analyses support the scale’s configural, metric (weak) and partial scalar (strong) measurement invariance across 21 countries. As expected, Motivation-to-Learn has significant relations to the working population’s engagement in learning in terms of participation in non-formal education over the last 12 months. These relations remain relevant after taking literacy as an indicator of level of education into account.ConclusionThe Motivation-to-Learn scale presented here may be used to indicate adult motivation in cross-country comparisons. The potential of using the scale in future PIAAC analyses and research on adult learning is discussed.

AB - BackgroundDespite the importance of lifelong learning as a key to individual and societal prosperity, we know little about adult motivation to engage in learning across the lifespan. Building on educational psychological approaches, this article presents a measure of Motivation-to-Learn using four items from the background questionnaire of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC).MethodsWe used multiple-group confirmatory factor analyses for ordered categorical data to investigate the scale's dimensionality and measurement invariance across countries. Regression analyses were used to investigate the scale's criterion validity.ResultsResults show that the proposed four-item scale fits the data considerably better than the original six-item scale labeled Readiness-to-Learn. Further analyses support the scale’s configural, metric (weak) and partial scalar (strong) measurement invariance across 21 countries. As expected, Motivation-to-Learn has significant relations to the working population’s engagement in learning in terms of participation in non-formal education over the last 12 months. These relations remain relevant after taking literacy as an indicator of level of education into account.ConclusionThe Motivation-to-Learn scale presented here may be used to indicate adult motivation in cross-country comparisons. The potential of using the scale in future PIAAC analyses and research on adult learning is discussed.

KW - Sociology

KW - Motivation-to-Learn

KW - Goal Orientation

KW - Measurement Invariance

KW - Intrinsic Motivation

KW - Task Engagement

KW - Background Questionnaire

KW - Sustainability education

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85019518926&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1186/s40536-016-0024-4

DO - 10.1186/s40536-016-0024-4

M3 - Journal articles

VL - 4

JO - Large-Scale Assessments in Education

JF - Large-Scale Assessments in Education

SN - 2196-0739

IS - 1

M1 - 9

ER -