International Conference “Risk in Contemporary Economy” ISSN-L 2067-0532 ISSN online 2344-5386 XVI th Edition, 2015, Galati, Romania, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati – Faculty of Economics and Business Administration 60 ACADEMIC MOTIVATION FOR BUSINESS INFORMATION SYSTEMS STUDENTS Catalin Maican maican@unitbv.ro Radu Lixandroiu lixi.radu@unitbv.ro Transilvania University of Brasov Academic Motivation Scale (AMS) was applied to Business Information Systems students for finding out their reasons and motives for enrolling this academic field, for undergraduate and postgraduate academic cycles. The students were presented the AMS scale translated in Romanian, together with other questionnaires. The first part of the paper makes a short introduction to AMS, the second describes its objectives, while the third presents the results. Key words: academic motivation scale, Business Information Systems. Introduction One of the most frequently used scales to measure the regulation of motivation according to self-determination theory is the Academic Motivation Scale (Alivernini & Lucidi, 2008; Vallerand, R. J., Pelletier, L. G., Blais, M. R., Brière, N. M., Senécal, C., Vallières, 1992, 1993). The AMS consists of 28 items, in which students respond to the question stem “Why are you going to college?” There are seven subscales on the AMS: The subscales reflected Amotivation (e.g., Honestly, I don’t know; I really feel that I am wasting my time in school), External Regulation (e.g., In order to obtain a more prestigious job later on), Introjected Regulation (e.g., Because of the fact that when I succeed in school I feel important), Identified Regulation (e.g., Because I think that a college education will help me better prepare for the career I have chosen), and Intrinsic Regulation (e.g., Because I experience pleasure and satisfaction while learning new things). The items are rated on a scale, ranging from one (does not correspond at all) to seven (corresponds exactly). Each subscale consists of four items each; thus subscale scores can range from 4 to 28. A high score on a subscale indicates high endorsement of that particular academic motivation (Kusurkar, Croiset, Kruitwagen, & ten Cate, 2011). This scale was validated with various populations including English- and French-speaking students, from high school to university levels, and it was also tested for factorial invariance across gender and across time (Grouzet, F. M. E., Otis, N., Pelletier, 2006). Although the original version of the AMS (Vallerand, R. J., Pelletier, L. G., Blais, M. R., Brière, N. M., Senécal, C., Vallières, 1992, 1993) consisted of seven subscales, four of which reflecting different types of extrinsic motivation and three distinguishing between forms of intrinsic motivation, more recent studies e.g.,(Otis, Grouzet, & Pelletier, 2005; Ratelle, Guay, Larose, & Senécal, n.d.) took into account only one measurement of intrinsic motivation (intrinsic motivation to know) and consequently evaluated five subscales instead of seven (Grouzet, F. M. E., Otis, N., Pelletier, 2006). Other measuring tools have been established to measure internal motivation but they failed to achieve the adhesion of the AMS. One such instrument is one developed by Finney and called Achievement Goal Questionnaire (Finney, Pieper, & Barron, 2004). This instrument was intended to measure four developments of motivation: mastery approach, mastery-avoidance approach, performance approach, and performance-avoidance approach. Validating the Achievement Goal Questionnaire, later studies conducted by (McCollum, D., Kajs, 2007) indicate that older students in an educational leadership program display higher levels of mastery-approach to learning as they are more internally motivated. Other scales such as the Mastery, Performance, and Alienation Goal Scale (Archer, 1994) also did not succeed in achieving the acceptance and validation of the AMS in a variety of studies. Nevertheless, with the creation of these instruments, the motivation domain gained credibility as it now has accurate tools in the assessment of motivation in individuals (Hegarty, 2010). On the whole, these results recommended that AMS is a valid and useful scale to measure academic motivation according to the multidimensional perspective of the self-determination theory. AMS was never validated with Romanian students, although (Gherasim, Maireana, & Butnaru, 2012) proposed an AMS adaptation to measure motivation toward field training in undergraduate students. Furthermore, (CAZAN & ANITEI, 2010) proposed an alternative measure for the evaluation