Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1002/ase.2544

Publication Title

Anatomical Sciences Education

Volume

Article in Press

Pages

1-13

Abstract

Educational and psychological research often involves comparing motivation across groups. It is critical to ensure that observed differences in motivation are true variations by group, not due to measurement biases. With a diverse sample of undergraduate students (N = 2200), this study measured internal consistency and gathered validity evidence based on the internal structure of five motivation scales. To compare motivation for biology between groups of undergraduate students, this study tested for measurement scalar invariance by group and, accordingly, conducted latent factor mean comparisons to understand true group differences. On average, female students held lower expectancy beliefs and self-efficacy for biology learning than males. Female students perceived higher attainment value and utility value for biology learning and higher psychological cost. First-generation college students held lower expectancy beliefs and self-efficacy but perceived higher attainment value for biology learning than continuing-generation students. No differences in average motivation for biology learning were found between underrepresented racial minority (URM) and non-URM students. The implications of these findings and future research directions are also discussed.

Rights

© 2025 The Authors

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Original Publication Citation

Dai, T., Xing, K., Kaplan, A., Cromley, J. G., Mara, K. R., & Perez, T. (2025). Differences in motivation for biology learning: A measurement invariance testing and latent mean comparison approach. Anatomical Sciences Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/ase.2544

ORCID

0000-0002-2008-2555 (Perez)

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