Abstract:

In the last years in field of education, great importance has been given to the theme of motivation in the educational context, namely, the motivation of teachers, a consequence of the teaching profession being constantly the target of numerous changing factors that, inevitably, may be contributing for a decrease in this class's motivation, identification with the teaching profession and commitment to their schools and an increase in general dissatisfaction at work (Day, 1999; Estrela, 2001).

Current literature highlights about self-determination theory (SDT) (Deci & Ryan, 2000), reveals great importance in understanding the motivational process and assumes the dimension of motivation, which make individuals more self-determined and self-motivated, raising thus their psychological growth: extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, introjected regulation and identified regulation, demotivation and amotivation.

The main objective of this study was to study the motivational dimensions of teachers in a group of schools in Portugal.
The specific objetive was to study the psychometric qualities of the MWMS motivation scale applied to 100 teachers from a group of schools in Portugal, in the southern region of the country, and to verify whether it determines any correlation between the domains under study.

As main results, the factorial analysis enabled the presentation of a final scale of 19 items with a factor structure similar to that obtained in the original studies. The dimension with the best internal consistency in terms of teachers' results is identified regulation and introjected regulation is the lowest.

The results also showed that the psychometric qualities have little or no correlation with the motivational dimensions of the respondents.

Future investigation is also needed with bigger samples to show psychometric qualities.

Keywords:

Self-motivation theory, motivation, self-determination, teachers, MWMS Scale.