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182 MEASUREMENT OF VARIABLES: OPERATIONAL DEFINITION AND SCALES

cannot be a dimension of achievement motivation, even though a motivated
person is likely to meet with it in large measure. Thus, achievement motivation
and performance and/or success may be highly correlated, but we cannot
measure an individual’s level of motivation through success and performance.
Performance and success could have been made possible as a consequence of
achievement motivation, but in and of themselves, the two are not measures of
it. To elaborate, a person with high achievement motivation might have failed
for some reason, perhaps beyond her control, to perform the job successfully.
Thus, if we judge the achievement motivation of this person with performance
as the yardstick, we would have measured the wrong concept. Instead of mea-
suring achievement motivation—our variable of interest—we would have mea-
sured performance, another variable we had not intended to measure nor were
interested in.
Thus, it is clear that operationally defining a concept does not consist of delin-
eating the reasons, antecedents, consequences, or correlates of the concept.
Rather, it describes its observable characteristics in order to be able to measure
the concept. It is important to remember this because if we either operationalize
the concepts incorrectly or confuse them with other concepts, then we will not
have valid measures. This means that we will not have “good” data, and our
research will not be scientific.
Having seen what an operational definition is, and what it is not, let us now
operationally define another concept that is relevant to the classroom: the con-
cept of “learning.”

Example 8.3 OPERATIONALIZING THE CONCEPT OF LEARNING
Learning is an important concept in the educational setting. Teachers tend to
measure student learning through exams. Students quite often feel, probably
rightly, that exams do not really measure learning—at least not the multiple-
choice questions that are asked in exams.
How then might we measure the abstract concept called learning? As before,
we need to define the concept operationally and break it down to observable
and measurable behaviors. In other words, we should delineate the dimensions
and elements of the concept of learning. The dimensions of learning may well
be as follows:

1. Understanding 2. Retention 3. Application

In other words, we can be reasonably certain that a student in the class is
“learning” when the individual (1) understands what is taught in the classroom,
(2) retains (i.e., remembers) what is understood, and (3) applies whatever has
been understood and remembered.
Terms such as understanding, remembering, and applying are still abstract
even though they have helped us to get a better grasp of what learning is all
about. It is necessary to break these three dimensions into elements so that we