Assessing Students’ Motivation and Learning Strategies in the Classroom Context:

Pintrich & De Groot, 1990). Motivational components include students' perceptions of the classroom environment as well as their self-related beliefs such as personal goals, self-efficacy, interest, and value beliefs. Cognitive components include students' content knowledge as well as various cognitive learning strategies such as rehearsal, elaboration, and organization, and metacognitive strategies such as planning, monitoring, and regulating learning (Garcia & Pintrich, 1994). Research in both experimental and field settings has consistently shown that positive motivational beliefs such as perceptions of high self-efficacy, a focus on mastery goals, high value and interest in the task or content, and low levels of test anxiety are positively related to greater cognitive engagement in terms of the use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies as well as actual academic performance (see Pintrich & Schrauben, 1992 for a review). Given that both motivational and cognitive components are important for classroom learning, how can we assess them in the classroom context? Of course, in laboratory studies there are a number of techniques that can be used, including reaction time or think-aloud protocols to measure strategy use, and actual experimental manipulations to induce certain types of motivational goals (cf. types of techniques can provide good construct validity and high internal validity, they do sacrifice some external validity and generalizability to the classroom setting. For example, students have self-efficacy beliefs for most academic tasks based on their past history of success and failure with similar tasks, while the laboratory task may be relatively unfamiliar to them. Students also have differing levels of personal interest and value for classroom academic tasks. In contrast, most laboratory tasks probably have low value for the typical student, as the artificiality of certain tasks (e.g., ring-tossing; puzzle completion) may make the activity seem Assessing students' motivation and learning strategies 3 unimportant or not meaningful to "real" life (however, the novelty of certain laboratory tasks can make them very interesting to students). Accordingly, if students' motivational beliefs for laboratory tasks may be qualitatively different from their motivational beliefs for classroom academic work, and if experimental settings may not adequately tap into the complex and multifaceted nature of students' beliefs regarding their classroom academic work, how might we realistically assess these beliefs in the classroom and link them to students' cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies? For researchers who aspire to study the interaction of motivation and cognition in a classroom setting, this presents a serious problem …