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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The adolescents’ school engagement: Assessment of its dimensions

subject

description

A topic that in the last years is getting relevance in school and students research is school engagement. This topic has been related, among other important constructs, with burnout of teachers and students, school performance, satisfaction with the school, behavioral disruption, goal orientation and motivational climate in the classroom, students-teachers relationships, and life satisfaction of the students. School engagement may be defined as the participation of the student in academic achievements, and it is understood as a multidimensional construct. The most repeated typology of dimensions recognizes three specific and overlapping dimensions: cognitive, behavioral, and emotional (affective). Frequently, education professionals have reported the lack of instruments to measure some students’ characteristics and psychosocial and behavioral variables in the classroom, as it is the case of school engagement. Recently, a fourth new dimension, personal agency, has been proposed (Reeve and Tseng, 2011). Veiga (2013) has been the first to present a self-report instrument, in Portuguese, to measure these four components, the Student Engagement Scale-4 dimensions (ses-4ds). Taken all this into account, the aim of this research was to study the reliability and validity of the aforementioned scale in two versions, Spanish and Portuguese, in large samples from the Dominican Republic and Angola. Results have shown a clear factor structure (after deleting two items), and adequate criterion-related and nomological validity. Accordingly, the ses-4d scale was considered a valid instrument to be applied in studies measuring school engagement of teenagers./n