Measuring motivation in collaborative inquiry-based learning contexts

Abstract

This paper argues that for understanding motivation in collaborative inquiry-based learning settings, there is an urgent need to develop new instruments that can capture the impact of the changes from the learning of welldefined content to open-ended inquiry and from individual learning to groupbased learning on learning motivation. It reports on the development of such an instrument, the Collaborative Inquiry-based Project Questionnaire (CIPQ). Confirmatory factor analysis of the CIPQ data on six independent groups (n=269, 235, 173, 192, 300 and 254) of students who participated computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) projects has consistently yielded a five-factor model of motivation (Project Work, Social Learning, Task, Reinforcement and Social Pressure factors). The validity of CIPQ was indicated by the empirical relationship found between the five factor scores and independent measures of the levels of project engagement of the students. © 2005 international Society of the Learning sciences.