Assessing Primary School Students' Intrinsic Motivation of Computational Thinking

Abstract

Intrinsic Motivation Inventory is a self-report instrument used to assess participants' experience regarding a particular activity. This paper examined the psychometric properties of a revised Intrinsic Motivation Inventory in the context of computational thinking learning. A total of 400 students from 4th grade participated in the pilot study. The revised instrument measured students' intrinsic motivation from four dimensions: interest/enjoyment, perceived competence, value/usefulness, and relatedness. The main findings of the study are twofold: (1) primary school students showed moderate to high motivation to learn computational thinking through programming and CS Unplugged; (2) factor analysis revealed that single factor model and multifactor model had good fit indices. However, discriminant validity of multifactor model was poor, suggesting the existence of a general factor.