Proposal of an instrument for measuring situational motivation with potential applications in educational contexts

The study of the motivational aspect and its relevance to the comprehension of the efficacy of learning has been the subject matter of several researches. According to the Self-determination Theory (SDT) there is a relation between the context, the motivation, and the performance of individuals in a given task. Thus, a continuum is defined between intrinsic, extrinsic, and lack of motivation; so individuals intrinsically motivated would perform optimally. In order to adequate the communication module of the system Sapiens for the learning of efficient energy consumption, this work has proposed to develop an instrument to evaluate the level of situational motivation of individuals, and to design persuasive messages to increase the engagement on the task, based on the motivation profiles described by SDT. For this, a methodology was defined comprising the following stages: (i) bibliographic research of the state-of-art scales to assess motivation; (ii) design of a data collection instrument in the form of a structured questionnaire; (iii) evaluation of the instrument considering an heterogeneous sample of 589 college, high-school, technical, master, and doctoral students, aged between 14 and 80 years, at three different situations (the library, the classroom, and leisure); (iv) design of the persuasive messages to enhance the user engagement on the task. The resulting instrument was named Ubiquitous Situational Motivation Scale (USMS), consisted in 18 questions presented as a 7-points Likert Scale, that measures four motivational factors with Cronbach alpha coefficients ranging from 0.61 to 0.86. Our study revealed that subjects' motivation profile varied according to the context, so leisure activities were respectively more related to intrinsic motivation than the library and the classroom activities, and suggests that classroom activities are probably more related to external regulation. The results were also consistent with the continuum hypothesis of SDT. The evaluation with potential users showed that the persuasive messages designed based on the motivational profiles were positively rated. From these results the persuasive module will integrated to the Sapiens platform so the performance of the users can be studied.