Towards the construction of a questionnaire for the identification of learning obstacles

Abstract

This paper deals with the identification of learning obstacles using the questionnaire method. Therefore, two iterations were proceeded: The first one was part of a survey that was carried out at four locations at universities of applied sciences. We asked students about obstructive facts in general providing items for five learning obstacle dimensions that were set up before; emotional/motivational, epistemological/cognitive, didactical, resource-related and meta-cognitive learning obstacle dimensions. After the general part, we asked them to answer the same question, but in relation to the — in their opinion — most difficult learning content. With this question, we aim to get indications regarding to epistemological obstacles. In a second step, we used the "Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire", which was developed by Pintrich [1] as a basis to develop a questionnaire that extracts learning obstacles. In its original version, the "Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire" was intended to measure students' learning strategies, but, as the obstacle dimensions were partly derived from learning strategy classification, we chose this already validated questionnaire [2]. Within this iteration, we could confirm a five-factor structure of the questionnaire that could be mapped to the five before set learning obstacle dimensions.