OECD's Brief Self-Report Measure of Educational Psychology's Most Useful Affective Constructs: Cross-Cultural, Psychometric Comparisons Across 25 Countries

Abstract

Through a rigorous process of selecting educational psychology's most useful affective constructs, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) constructed the Students' Approaches to Learning (SAL) instrument, which requires only 10 min to measure 14 factors that assess self-regulated learning strategies, self-beliefs, motivation, and learning preferences. This study evaluated SAL responses from nationally representative samples of approximately 4,000 15-year-olds from each of 25 countries (N = 107,899)—OECD's Program For International Student Assessment database. In one of the largest and most powerful cross-cultural comparisons of diverse educational psychology constructs, this study used multiple group confirmatory factor analyses to show that SAL's a priori 14-factor solution is well defined and reasonably invariant across the 25 countries, as are relations between SAL factors and 4 criterion variables (gender, socioeconomic status, math achievement, and verbal achievement). The results support posited relations among constructs derived from different theoretical perspectives and their cross-cultural generalizability. The SAL provides a standard set of educational psychological measures that have been translated into many languages with nationally representative norms that have been validated across the world. These should be a useful focus or supplement in diverse educational psychology research settings, and should provide the longitude and latitude against which to map new and existing educational psychology constructs.