Cross-cultural measurement of learning style, epistemological beliefs, motivation, and their relationship to academic achievement: The case of Saudi Arabian and American college students.

摘要

One of the two major goals of this study was to revise the ILP-R and to return it to its original four factors that were grounded in Information Processing Theory. The second major goal was to establish the technical, linguistic and measurement equivalence of the Inventory of Learning Processes-Revised (ILP-R).; Two studies were conducted in order to establish the above two goals. In the first study 131 (ILP-R) items were analyzed in order to shorten the new version of the ILP-R, the results of item analysis left 74 items. These items were administrated to 388 American and 236 Saudi Arabian college students. The results show that both samples had similar internal consistencies which support the previous findings of Schmeck, et al. (1977) and Geisler-Brenstein and Schmeck, (1995). Also during the first study the technical and linguistic equivalence were established. Multiple translation procedures were used to adapt the ILP-R for optimal translation accuracy. These findings provide good evidence to support the technical and linguistic equivalence of the English and Arabic versions.; In the second study using 388 American and 236 Saudi Arabian undergraduate students, the findings show that both samples had a similar factor structure, internal consistency, inter-scale correlations, and item-scale correlations to the original ILP.; To establish measurement equivalence, logistic regression and judgmental methods were used. After the purification procedure was conducted, 7 items were flagged for Differential Item Function (DIF). These seven items were reviewed judgmentally to discover why they displayed DIF. Two items could have been translated improperly. One item was identified as having different relevance across cultures. Reasons why the other four items displayed DIF could not be determined.; These findings provide some evidence supporting the measurement equivalence of the original and translated versions of the ILP-R. More research regarding the verification of the psychometric properties of the newly revised ILP-R for American, Saudi Arabian, and potentially, for college students from other Arabic-speaking countries is needed. However, the overall results indicate that the newly revised ILP-R can be used with the American population and to assess learning styles in populations other than American college students.