Adaptation of California Measure of Mental Motivation –CM3

Abstract

Education without doubt, plays a vital role for individuals to gain the essential personal traits of the 21st century, also known as “knowledge age”. One of the most important skills among these fundamental qualities which the individuals should be equipped with is critical thinking. California Measure of Mental Motivation-CM3 was developed by Giancarlo, Blohm & Urdan (2004) to assess secondary school students’ critical thinking dispositions which is one of the characteristic components of critical thinking. Detecting secondary school students’ dispositions toward critical thinking is desired to be one of the main foci in many Turkish educational studies; however, it seems there is no Turkish psychological measurement instrument, assessing this feature among these age groups. Adapting this scale into Turkish culture will support the future studies on critical thinking by supplying a new instrument to the psychological measurement literature. The adaptation process has revealed that CM3 retains a four-factor structure in Turkish culture, similarly to the original form, and this structure has been confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis. In terms of the internal consistency, the Cronbach’s alpha reliability values have appeared to be between the reference values based in the literature. Furthermore, the test-retest reliability analysis has exposed considerably high level and significant correlation.