"Just a Methodological Cautionary Note: The Jingle Jangle of Self-Related Beliefs in Motivational Measures"

Second-year doctoral student Hye Rin Lee, Alumnus Peter McPartlan (Ph.D. '19), Alumnus Osman Umarji (Ph.D. '19), Alumna Quijie Lee (Ph.D. '19), and Distinguished Professor Jacquelynne Eccles have published in the Journal of Educational and Psychological Research. The title of their article is "Just a Methodological Cautionary Note: The Jingle Jangle of Self-Related Beliefs in Motivational Measures."

Lee's (left) is specializing in Human Development in Context (HDiC) and is advised by Dr. Eccles. Her research interests include self-reflection, academic interventions, online learning in education, measurement, temporal motivation, and resilience in students with disabilities. Her recent honors include the 2018 Provost Ph.D. Fellowship, Eugene Cota-Robles Diversity Fellowship, and NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Prior to UCI, Hye Rin received her B.A. in Psychology and Sociology from Franklin and Marshall College.

McPartlan (right) specialized in Learning, Teaching, Cognition, and Development for his doctoral work. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow in the psychology department at San Diego State University. His research interests are centered on how the classroom environment affects academic motivation.

​Umarji (left) specialized in Human Development in Context for his doctoral work. Currently, he is the director of survey research and evaluation at Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, where he continues his study of parental influences on child development, student motivation, and adolescent development.

Li (right) is postdoctoral researcher in the Learning Analytics Research Network (LEARN) at New York University, where she pursues her research interests in machine learning, text-mining, and other techniques that inform ongoing learning activities.. 

Eccles's academic research focuses on gender-role socialization, classroom influences on student motivation, and social development in the family and school context. She is internationally recognized for her development of the expectancy-value theory of motivation and her concept of stage-environment. ​​

​​Eccles is a member of the National Academy of Education, a World Scholar at the University of London, Visiting Professor at the University of Tubingen, Germany, and Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney, Australia. At UCI, Eccles also directs the Motivation and Identity Research Lab (MIRL).

Abstract

​​Many fields in academia face problems with either same named scales measuring what are actually different constructs (i.e., the jingle fallacies) or differently named scales measuring the same construct (i.e., the jangle fallacies). In this study, we examined the overlap between a set of 10 measures of self-related beliefs of academic motivation constructs in two different biology courses: value items (e.g., utility value, interest value, attainment value, and cost value), achievement goal orientation items (e.g., mastery approach, mastery avoidance, performance approach, and performance avoidance), and intrinsic/extrinsic motivation items. Exploratory factor analyses and structural equation modeling indicated that the covariance among the items is not captured by an item-based factor solution, suggesting these named scales are plagued by the jingle jangle fallacy. These findings suggest that researchers should either use these constructs independently of each other or attempt to find a more unified theory of academic self-related motivational beliefs when examining these constructs together, especially in statistical analyses.