Investigation of measurement invariance of school motivation scale in terms of gender and class level

The aim of this research is to examine the measurement invariance of the school motivation scale (Kan, Özhan and Kaynak, 2017) in terms of gender and grade level variables and to obtain evidence for the construct validity of the scale. The study group of the study consists of 600 students in the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade levels of secondary school at a public school in Gaziantep province. The school motivation scale, which was used as a data collection tool in the research, is a five point Likert scale consisting of three sub-dimensions and a total of 14 items. Before starting the analysis of the data, the assumptions to the analysis were checked. First, the school motivation model was confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis using data related to the whole group. Then, whether the confirmed model provided measurement invariance between gender and grade level subgroups was tested gradually by multi-group confirmatory factor analysis method. According to the findings of the analysis, it was observed that the school motivation model provided partial metric invariance according to gender and grade level variables. Therefore, it can be said that the factors are measured in the same way in the subgroups related to gender and class levels. While making comparisons and interpretations among the sub-groups based on the scores obtained from the school motivation scale, it should be considered that the model provided configural invariance and metric invariance but not scalar invariance and residual invariance.