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The term "nei juan" (in English "involution") has become a buzzword in recent Chinese tertiary educational contexts, denoting the intense competition and anxiety among Chinese college students. This project aims to develop a reliable and valid scale measuring Chinese college students' competitive psychology, that is, an Academic Involution Scale for College Students in China (AISCSC). To this end, the scale was administered online to 1015 Chinese college students from a university from the Northern China. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses resulted in a determination of three factors (i.e., academic behavior, social activity, and social relationship) with a strong psychometric basis. The correlations between students' academic anxiety and their involutional behavior further confirmed the concurrent validity of AISCSC. Practitioner points: Academic behavior, social activity, and social relationship constitute three major dimensions of academic involution for Chinese college students.Involution in the context of education is a multifaceted issue with political, social, and psychological dimensions beyond anxiety, pressure, and competitive motivation that have been previously studied.Unlike the previous studies highlighting the negative psychological effects of involution, Academic Involution Scale for College Students in China ("AISCSC") was moderately and significantly related to the academic anxiety of the subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) is one of the most widely used instruments to measure students' motivation and self‐regulated learning. However, the MSLQ was developed and has been predominantly used in the Western context, is a domain‐general measure, and is quite lengthy. Hence, adapting the MSLQ to the Chinese educational context, validating its application in specific subjects, and developing a short form would be an optimal way to improve its accessibility. This study aimed to investigate the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the MSLQ in mathematics learning (i.e., MSLQ‐C) and develop a short form (i.e., MSLQ‐CS) using set exploratory structural equation modeling. The sample consisted of 563 senior secondary students in China. Results demonstrated that both MSLQ‐C and MSLQ‐CS showed acceptable construct validity, reliability, and concurrent validity. Furthermore, structural relationships and interrelationships among the subscales and their relationships with mathematics achievement were highly similar for MSLQ‐C and MSLQ‐CS. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. Practitioner Points: We developed the MSLQ‐CS as a short form of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) in the Chinese context for mathematics learningEach variable of the MSLQ‐CS was reduced to three items but we kept the MSLQ's conceptual scope unchangedThe MSLQ‐CS is psychometrically sound and able to reproduce the information obtained from the longer form of the MSLQThe MSLQ‐CS could reduce participants' burden and be used when test time is limited [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]