Psychometric Evaluation of the Music Model of Motivation in Mathematics: A Case of Secondary School Students in Nigeria

Mathematics underachievement remains a persistent problem in Nigerian secondary education. While motivation is widely recognised as a contributing factor, existing Nigerian research has relied on generic motivation scales that cannot identify which specific classroom strategies teachers should target. This study addresses that gap by conducting a psychometric evaluation of the MUSIC model of mathematics motivation among randomly selected 248 secondary school students in Kaduna State, Nigeria. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the hypothesised five-factor structure (empowerment, usefulness, success, interest, and caring), first as separate single-factor models and then as a combined, correlated five-factor model, using the WLSMV estimator. Then, McDonald's omega was used to estimate the reliability coefficient. Results showed that empowerment, success and caring dimensions demonstrated an excellent model fit of the single factor structure with generated dataset. For each of the usefulness and interest dimensions, the model was saturated with appropriate local fit indices. The combined five-factor model achieved acceptable, though not excellent, global fit (CFI = .949, TLI = .938, RMSEA = .070, SRMR = .048), but revealed markedly high correlations among interest, success, and usefulness (up to .94), raising discriminant validity concerns. Reliability was strong for the scale overall (ω = .872) but fell below the .70 threshold for empowerment (ω = .684) and interest (ω = .639) individually. These findings indicate that the MUSIC–M can be used with reasonable confidence to measure students’ motivation in mathematics.