The Adoption of a Questionnaire to Evaluate High School Science Teachers’ Motivation for Reading and Teaching with Primary Scientific Literature

The motivation of educators to select and utilize specific instructional tools, such as primary scientific literature (PSL), remains an unexplored area. PSL-based instruction has shown positive outcomes for undergraduate students, but its use in high schools remains limited, likely due to the significant influence of teacher motivation on the choice of instructional tools. Our study shed light on constructs that define teachers’ motivation to read and teach with PSL. We seek to adopt and validate an instrument that measures the identity (performance/competence and interest) and expectancy-value constructs (self-efficacy, attainment value, intrinsic value, utility value, and perceived costs) that shape teacher motivation. We hypothesize that our measurement of these constructs will reveal redundancies and that increasing motivation to participate in a task (reading PSL) will boost the likelihood of using that task as an instructional tool (teaching using PSL). The questionnaire was administered to high school science teachers in the United States and was validated using factor analysis. The finalized instrument revealed the redundancies across the motivation constructs, confirming that identity and expectancy-value constructs can be used to measure motivation in two different but valid ways. Overall, there was less motivation for teaching using PSL than for reading PSL in performance/competence and self-efficacy constructs. Higher perceived costs were associated with teaching, and there were significant differences between reading and teaching using PSL in attainment value and self-efficacy. Our questionnaire to measure motivation for selecting an instructional tool can provide valuable insights into teachers’ attitudes toward using specific instructional strategies.