Exploring facets of student motivation using a Bass Ackward strategy and the conceptual lens of self-determination theory
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
• This study examined how a wide range of motives empirically and conceptually relate to each other, leading to the identification of twenty-six distinct motivation facets, providing a comprehensive view of diverse motivational constructs in higher education. • These motivation facets were coherently related to educational outcomes, providing valuable insights for theory and measurement in understanding student motivation. • Multidimensional scaling analyses suggest a differentiated continuum of student motivation, consistent with Self-Determination Theory. Motivational constructs have proliferated in educational psychology, reflecting the complexity of what moves people to engage and learn. In this exploratory research, we focused on students’ motivation for higher education. Our goal was to understand how a wide range of motives are empirically and conceptually related. We also examined how this diversity of motivational content relates to the motivational typology postulated by Self-Determination Theory (SDT). In Study 1, we extracted items from a broad collection of measures, formatted them with a common set of instructions, and administered them to multiple samples of current and former U.S. college students. Using Goldberg’s (2006) Bass Ackward factor-analytic method, we distilled twenty-six distinct facets that capture a wide variety of motivational contents. Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) suggested a dimension that resembled SDT’s continuum of relative autonomy, with some facets similar to amotivation and others falling along a range from less to more autonomous or volitional forms of motivation. In Study 2, we administered these provisionally labelled motivational facets alongside SDT’s regulatory styles and a set of external criteria covering multiple outcomes of interest in higher education. MDS analyses replicated the general pattern found in Study 1, recovering a dimension resembling SDT’s continuum of autonomy. Motivational facets were also associated with external criteria in a theoretically coherent manner. We discuss the implications of these exploratory findings for understanding the structure of self-reported motivation and for theory and measurement of student motivation.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it