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Abstract: The original version of the Academic Motivation Scale (AMS) developed by Vallerand et al. (1989) has been very effective in measuring student motivation in various educational contexts, and has become an extremely important tool. Although it has been extensively tested, since its first validation, especially in the last decade, there is no study that validates it in the case of university students attending the Curricular Units (CU) of Accounting and Marketing. The need to validate the scale and apply it to different contexts and samples grants the present study academic relevancy. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to validate AMS regarding Portuguese students who attend Accounting and Marketing in Universities and Polytechnic Institutes, in order to develop an Accounting and Marketing Academic Motivation Scale (AMAMS) and to test its psychometric capacities. Results show that the use of AMS to measure the motivation of Accounting and Marketing students is statistically valid, reliable and robust.
Keywords: academic motivation scale, amotivation, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, accounting, marketing
1.Introduction
Lack of motivation has been deemed a predictor of students' academic achievement and is correlated with expected results like students' academic performance and their attitudes in an educational context (Barkoukis, Tsorbatzoudis, Grouios, & Sideridis, 2008). Therefore, new instruments must be created that can effectively and robustly measure student motivation in a given context, place and field of knowledge (Palacios, Arias, & Arias, 2014). Motivation can become an important indicator of all the factors that should be taken into account in the teaching-learning process so that changes can be made to improve what needs improving and maintain what is being properly done. Consequently, knowing all the motivational processes that have to do with students and assessing them can provide one with information on what paths to follow and what policies to implement to improve academic achievement.
Despite its complexity, motivation in general, and, in particular, its measuring have become more and more relevant in academia, and led to the creation of strategies to understand and enhance its applicability (Glynn, 2007). It has been looked into from different theoretical perspectives, among which the Social Cognitive Theory (Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, & McKeachie, 1993), a Expectancy Value theory (Wigfield, 1994) and the Self Determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000c) stand...