Abstract
The purpose of this study was to develop and test a new measure of motivation and engagement when reading for academic purposes on the Internet. Confirmatory factor analysis of the scores of 386 Norwegian pre-service teachers showed that a seven-factor model including the positive reading motivation and engagement constructs of intrinsic reading motivation, perceived competence in reading, valuing of reading, and dedication to reading, as well as the negative reading motivation and engagement constructs of perceived difficulty of reading, devaluing of reading, and avoidance of reading, fit the data well. Moreover, regression analyses showed that these reading motivation and engagement constructs contributed to time spent on the Internet for academic purposes and academic achievement over and above gender, educational level, teaching practice, and total time spent on the Internet. Taken together, these findings provide preliminary evidence for the construct validity of the measure. The discussion highlights how this measure may be used in future research on the roles of reading motivation and engagement in Internet reading contexts.
Highlights
The purpose of this study was to develop and test a new measure of motivation and engagement when reading for academic purposes on the Internet
Given that reading motivation and engagement may function differently when reading for academic purposes than when reading for other purposes, and that reading for academic purposes on the Internet may be different from reading for academic purposes in general, we considered it pertinent to create a new measure that targeted reading motivation and engagement when reading for academic purposes on the Internet, in particular
In addition to testing the dimensionality of scores on this measure in a sample of pre-service teachers, we examined whether the proposed reading motivation and engagement constructs could improve the prediction of the time participants spent on the Internet for academic purposes as well as their academic achievement beyond that afforded by differences in gender, educational level, teaching practice, and total time spent on the Internet
Summary
The purpose of this study was to develop and test a new measure of motivation and engagement when reading for academic purposes on the Internet. We built on extant work in reading psychology highlighting and demonstrating the role of motivation and engagement in learning from text. Of note is that the measure we developed and tested did not target motivation for and engagement in general usage of the Internet for academic purposes but, online reading to learn academic content within a particular domain. This study was framed by theory and prior research on reading motivation and engagement
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