Motivational orientations and learning strategies of engineering students using MSLQ

Determining university students’ motivational orientations and their use of different learning strategies reveals important characteristics of their self-regulation skills and personal functioning. Psychologists and educational researchers have sought different ways to assess these characteristics e.g., by several questionnaires. One of the most well-known questionnaire is the MSLQ (Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire) that has been developed by Pintrich et al. in 1991. In this study, goal orientations, control of learning beliefs, self-efficacy for learning performance, resource management strategies as well as cognitive and metacognitive strategies of 62 engineering students from TUT (Tampere University of Technology) have been assessed using an extract of 22 questions from the MSLQ plus five additional queries, which have been formed by the author.

Students rated themselves anonymously using integers on a Likert scale between 1 (“not at all true of me”) and 5 (“very true of me”). The rating distributions obtained indicate that the goal orientation of the students is mostly intrinsic than extrinsic. The students also have relatively strong control beliefs over their own learning. However, for some reasons, they have only moderate self-efficacy beliefs for learning performance. In addition, students’ use of resource management strategies like scheduling of own learning considerably varies between individuals. Relative large deviations were also observed within learning strategies scales. Nonetheless, the results from the questionnaire gives insight into students’ motivational orientations and their use of learning strategies, which help staff members to gain better understanding of different functioning of students attending to the class.