Validating motivated strategies for learning questionnaire and invariance test across gender and caste groups in India

Abstract

Non-cognitive competencies play critical role in education. Interventions targeted at these competencies require access to valid measures. Within Indian context, no such validated measure exists at present, and teachers depend on their subjective evaluation of students’ non-cognitive competencies represented via grade or comment on report card. This study examined convergent validity and measurement invariance of seven sub-scales of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ), a widely used tool but not yet validated within Indian context. MSLQ, a measure of several non-cognitive competencies, was validated across four castes and two gender groups (N = 6423 elementary school students), the two categories highly relevant in the Indian context. For establishing convergent validity, multi-group confirmatory factor analysis was conducted where all the subfactors were allowed to correlate with each other. For measurement invariance, configural, metric, and scalar invariance were assessed by sequentially imposing more restrictive conditions. We found evidence for strong configural, metric, and scalar invariance across the gender and caste groups, and across all the seven sub-scales of MSLQ. Results also indicated good model fit for all caste and gender groups, thus establishing the convergent validity of all the sub-scales. The implications of the findings are discussed.

Keywords

• mslq
• non-cognitive competencies
• convergent validity
• measurement invariance