OECD's Brief Self-Report Measure of Educational Psychology's Most Useful Affective Constructs: Cross-Cultural, Psychometric Comparisons Across 25 Countries

TLDR

The SAL offers a globally validated, multilingual set of educational psychology measures with nationally representative norms. The study aims to position SAL as a reference framework for mapping and comparing educational psychology constructs across research settings. The authors developed a 10‑minute SAL instrument covering 14 affective factors and tested it on 107,899 15‑year‑olds from 25 countries using PISA data. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the 14‑factor SAL model’s invariance across 25 countries and validated its expected relationships with gender, socioeconomic status, math, and verbal achievement.

Abstract

Through a rigorous process of selecting educational psychology's most useful affective constructs, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) constructed the Students' Approaches to Learning (SAL) instrument, which requires only 10 min to measure 14 factors that assess self-regulated learning strategies, self-beliefs, motivation, and learning preferences. This study evaluated SAL responses from nationally representative samples of approximately 4,000 15-year-olds from each of 25 countries (N = 107,899)—OECD's Program For International Student Assessment database. In one of the largest and most powerful cross-cultural comparisons of diverse educational psychology constructs, this study used multiple group confirmatory factor analyses to show that SAL's a priori 14-factor solution is well defined and reasonably invariant across the 25 countries, as are relations between SAL factors and 4 criterion variables (gender, socioeconomic status, math achievement, and verbal achievement). The results support posited relations among constructs derived from different theoretical perspectives and their cross-cultural generalizability. The SAL provides a standard set of educational psychological measures that have been translated into many languages with nationally representative norms that have been validated across the world. These should be a useful focus or supplement in diverse educational psychology research settings, and should provide the longitude and latitude against which to map new and existing educational psychology constructs.