The M-PerFeCt questionnaire: assessing higher education students’ motivation in a peer feedback context

In higher education, teacher feedback has increasingly been replaced or complemented with peer feedback. But, when students lack motivation, they may not participate in the peer feedback activity adequately, and, thus, the activity may not have the desired effect. Motivation is a complex, difficult-to-measure concept, and existing questionnaires for assessing students’ motivation in the context of a peer feedback intervention in higher education have each considered only a few aspects of motivation to learn or motivation to participate in the peer feedback activity. However, a questionnaire that concurrently assesses (almost) all aspects of higher education students’ motivation in a peer feedback context is needed for researchers and practitioners to obtain a complete picture of students’ motivation, so they can determine whether and how this motivation needs to be improved. Therefore, this study aimed to develop the Motivation in a Peer Feedback Context (M-PerFeCt) questionnaire. Methodological pluralism was used to capture this complex concept while ensuring more rigorous scientific results, including eliciting a student and expert appraisal of the questionnaire and collecting responses to the questionnaire from higher education students in The Netherlands and performing exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Pre-activity and post-activity forms of the questionnaire were developed and validated. The final questionnaire comprised 66 items in 19 scales. The questionnaire provides insight into the underlying structure of students’ motivation in a peer feedback context. Additionally, it enables teachers and researchers to assess students’ motivation in a peer feedback context.