Developing a Measure of Individual Differences in College Students’ Awareness of Their Metamotivational Feelings

• In Event: Exploring the Role of Metamotivational Feelings in Students’ Regulation of Their Motivation

Abstract

Aims/Background
Building on the work of Miele and Scholer (2018), we developed a model that explains how differences in students’ awareness of their metamotivational feelings impact their academic achievement and well-being (see Figure 1). The model suggests that, when working on academic tasks (e.g., studying for an exam), students who are more (vs. less) attentive to such feelings and believe that they are capable of controlling their motivation should be particularly likely to implement regulation strategies targeting the specific motivational/emotional obstacles that are undermining their task engagement. Studies have shown some of these strategies to be positively associated with task effort, achievement, and resilience (Fong et al., 2024; Stover et al., 2024). In contrast, students who attend to their metamotivational feelings, but assume that they are unable to control their motivation, may be unlikely to use effective regulation strategies and instead perseverate about negative feelings that have become salient.
As a first step toward testing this model, we constructed a measure that assesses multiple dimensions of students’ metamotivational awareness (see Table 1 for a subset of items). Many of the dimensions were based on a prior instrument that assesses general interoceptive awareness (Mehling et al., 2012). We will present findings from an initial study assessing the structure and predictive validity of our measure.

Method
A total of 70 items, clustered into six subscales, were developed in English and translated into Spanish. Three subscales assessed students’ attention to the “internal signals” associated with their motivation. These signals were defined as “bodily sensations, feelings, and emotions” that could be “pleasant or unpleasant.” Two subscales focused on students’ efficacy/agency for identifying motivational states and modifying them. The final subscale assessed whether students attended more to internal or behavioral cues when monitoring their motivation.
A survey including the novel measure was administered to 272 students at a Chilean university. The final sample consisted of 212 participants, after exclusions (60.8% female; Mage = 22.1). The survey also included measures of self-efficacy, motivation/emotion regulation, well-being, grit, and mindsets (see Table 2).

Results/Discussion
To examine the dimensionality of the new measure, we conducted a series of exploratory factor analyses (EFAs). The sixth subscale did not function as expected and is still being analyzed; the 50 items from this subscale were removed from the final EFA reported here. This analysis showed that 18 of 20 items from the remaining subscales loaded onto four, conceptually valid factors (Table 1).
We then examined correlations between means scores for the four factors and the additional measures of motivation, self-regulation, and well-being (Table 2). The results showed a number of interesting associations. For example, the “directing attention” dimension of metamotivational awareness was positively associated with students’ use of motivation regulation strategies, perseverance, and well-being, and negatively associated with emotion dysregulation. In contrast, the “noticing internal signals” dimension was negatively associated with well-being and positively associated with emotion dysregulation. These results suggest that simply being aware of one’s metamotivational feelings may not be adaptive unless one can monitor them in an agentic manner.

Authors

• Erika Alvarez-Atencio, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

• David B. Miele, Boston College

• Jesús M. Alvarado, Universidad Complutense de Madrid