Self-assessment of Motivation for Information and Communication Technologies Learning: Results of a Pilot Study Among Secondary School Students
Abstract
Self-assessment is often used in research, school and employment. Respondents mark on a scale, for example, how good their skills and knowledge are or how they feel in a particular situation.
One of the field in which self-assessment can be applied is motivation. The aim of this paper is (a) to find out the level of internal and external motivation for learning ICT in different groups of pupils (by type of school and gender), (b) to find out how different groups of pupils (by type of school and gender) use the scale of self-assessment motivation to learn ICT.
The sample consists of pupils studying at four types of secondary schools (pedagogical lyceum, four-year grammar school, technical school - mechanization, school focused on information technology; N = 166). The results show differences in the level of motivation to learn information and communication technologies among these groups.
Students of Information technology programm have significantly higher levels of internal and external motivation. When compared by gender, boys have higher internal and external motivation.
Individual respondents use the scale in a significantly different way to evaluate ICT motivation. However, at the level of the groups examined by us (gender, type of school), only slight differences in scale use were found (ICT school students tend to use rather lower scale categories, they are stricter).
In further research, it is necessary to analyze the differences in the use of the scale among other groups (e-g. according to socio-economic status or peers). Furthermore, due to the high heterogeneity in the use of the scale, we recommend correcting the self-assessment of motivation using the method of anchoring vignettes.