The Development and Validation of Instrument for Measuring High School Students' STEM Career Motivation

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to develop and validate an instrument to assess STEM career motivation. We developed 32 items for 7 constructs (i.e. education experience, career value, academic self-efficacy, career self-efficacy, career interest, parents` support, and career motivation) on STEM career motivation based on Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT; Lent et al.,1994). 767 first year high school students participated in this study. The items were validated by Messick`s framework (1995). In this study, we examined the validity of items in four aspects (i.e. content, substantive, structural and generalizability of validity). Methodologically, we used Rasch analysis, Exploratory factor analysis, confirmative factor analysis based on structural equation modelling. We confirmed that our instrument with 32 items as valid and reliable for measuring the STEM career motivation. In addition, we tested the STEM career motivation model based on SCCT. Our model explained the data well, suggesting that external factors (education experience and parents` support) and cognitive factors (perception of value, self-efficacy and interest) were significantly related to STEM career motivation.