MEL-TS: a translingual set of mental effort and mental load self-rating items in six languages

Product or Programme · All products and programmes
Evidence · 6 claims (6 for) · 2 studies (1 associational, 1 qualitative), q2 · 1 of 2 report an effect size · 6 claims rest on one study

Description

A multilingual self-report instrument developed by Tino Endres et al. for assessing learners' perceived mental effort and mental load during self-regulated learning.

Components

• MEL-TS: a translingual set of mental effort and mental load self-rating items in six languages: The MEL-TS is a set of self-rating items assessing mental effort and mental load during self-regulated learning, developed in English, Dutch, Spanish, German, Mandarin Chinese, and French. The initial pool comprised ten items — "five for mental effort and five for mental load" — inspired by established measures (Paas, 1992; Klepsch & Seufert, 2021; Krell, 2017; Leppink et al., 2013), with reversed items to mitigate response bias. The final quantitative version used four items per construct plus a 'heart and soul' intensity item and a difficulty item, with all items available on the Open Science Framework. (Tino Endres et al. (2025))

Claims

• The 'heart and soul' effort item is suitable for learning contexts in Mandarin Chinese and Spanish but not in the other interviewed cultures [+W]
• In a preregistered within-subjects experiment (N = 131, eight measurements), the translated scale showed criterion validity via sensitivity to task complexity, extraneous load, and motivation [+W]
• The scale showed convergent and incremental validity through medium-size correlations with established cognitive load measures [+W]
• Bilingual interviewees across six languages all recognized the effort–load distinction but emphasized different aspects of each construct [+W]
• Invested mental effort and perceived task difficulty are strongly correlated yet relate differently to relative task difficulty, indicating the two ratings measure different aspects of overall cognitive load [+W]
• Effort was consistently described as willful, motivation-dependent investment, whereas load was described as imposed and difficult to control [+W]

Related Products and Programmes

• Cognitive Load Questionnaire (CLQ) by Klepsch et al. (2017)
• Paas 9-point mental effort rating scale

Key Sources

• Tino Endres, Lisa Bender, Stoo Sepp, Shirong Zhang, Louise David, Melanie Trypke, et al. (2025). Developing the Mental Effort and Load–Translingual Scale (MEL‑TS) as a Foundation for Translingual Research in Self‑Regulated Learning. Educational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09978-8

Page metadata

Field	Value
type	product
id	mel-ts-a-translingual-set-of-mental-effort-and-mental-load-self-rating-items-in-six-langua
title	MEL-TS: a translingual set of mental effort and mental load self-rating items in six languages
description	A multilingual self-report instrument developed by Tino Endres et al.
status	review
product_kind	assessment
generated	by process:settle-candidates on 2026-10-21
trust	unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content

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