Development of the Reading Motivation Scale

Reading is a complex cognitive activity. On one side, it encompasses different components such as phonemic awareness, word recognition, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and others, while on the other, it involves motivation. Reading motivation is a multifaceted structure that can be developed or transformed. In this context, determining students' levels of motivation is considered crucial. The aim of this study is to develop a scale to measure the reading motivation levels of students aged 8-10. To achieve this objective, a needs assessment was initially conducted, an item pool was created, expert opinions were sought, and preliminary trials and pilot applications were carried out with different participants. Subsequently, the scale was administered to students for validity and reliability testing. The study's participants were selected using the maximum variation sampling method and comprised a total of 432 students from third, fourth, and fifth grades. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was conducted to assess the construct validity of the scale, and the analysis revealed that the scale consists of five factors. These factors were named as follows: Approval Dimension of Reading, Curiosity Dimension of Reading, Interest Dimension of Reading, Difficulty Dimension of Reading, and Social Dimension of Reading. The Cronbach's Alpha reliability coefficient for the entire scale was calculated to be .78. The scale consists of a total of 18 items, with possible participant scores ranging from 18 to 72. According to the scoring scale, students' reading motivation levels are classified as "very low" for scores between 18-28, "low" for scores between 29-39, "medium" for scores between 40-50, "high" for scores between 51-61, and "very high" for scores between 62-72.