The purpose of this report is to provide a detailed overview of the development and initial validation of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ). The MSLQ is an 81-item, self-report instrument designed to measure college students' motivational orientations and their use of various learning strategies (Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, & McKeachie, 1991). This report reviews the history of the MSLQ, the nature of the instrument, its intended purpose, the population for whom it was developed, scoring procedures, and the ways in which the scores can and have been used. Additionally, this review includes a detailed commentary on the adequacy of the instrument development procedures, including reliability and validity evidence gathered. Furthermore, this report provides an abbreviated reference list of empirical studies that employed the instrument and describes, in detail, how the instrument was used in two different investigations. Finally, the report ends with an overall qualitative assessment of the MSLQ. Appended are: (1) MSLQ Item List; (2) Items within the 15 MSLQ Subscales and the Subscales' Corresponding Coefficient Alphas; (3) Correlations between MSLQ Subscales; (4) Descriptive Statistics and Scale Correlations; and (5) Empirical Studies Using the MSLQ. (Contains 4 tables.)