Achievement Motivation as a Function of Participation, Strive, Willingness to Work and Maintaining Work: Application of Structural Equation Modelling (SEM)

摘要

Achievement Motivation is an interesting topic that should be carefully examined to find its core purpose. Self-report measures of achievement motivation are available, but are embodied in questionnaire measuring variety of personality traits. Researchers often require only the score on an achievement motivation scale, and a less time-consuming method of obtaining such scores is needed. Ellez (2004) proposed a 23-item scale instrument, named Achievement Motive Scale (AMS) , to examine and measure the construct of achievement motivation. The items are intended to measure the students' achievement motive in the size of strive, participation, willingness to work and maintaining the working on a five scores Likert scale. The aim of this article is to study the relationship, formulate a model and test the significance of the four dimensions of the AMS. The survey design was employed involving 295 first and second year senior high school students. Using Hu and Bentler (1999) suggested benchmarks for continuous data, the analysis reported a RMSEA = 0.188 > 0.06, TFI = 0.395 < 0.95, CFI = 0.798 < 0.95, giving an indication the model fit cannot be concluded to be good. The hypothesis that the model is correct was falsified by the application of SEM. Among the four dimensions, participation was statistically insignificant in measuring one’s achievement motivation level. Although, the three other dimensions were identified as significant, the indicator items do not explain much of their variability. This suggests that more other items should be considered to bridge the huge gap of variability left to randomness.