Measuring four-dimensional engagement in school: A validation of the Student Engagement Scale and of the Agentic Engagement Scale

Abstract

Student engagement has traditionally been defined as a metaconstruct made up of three aspects: emotional, behavioral, and cognitive. Recently, however, a fourth component has been proposed, namely the agentic one. Notwithstanding the widely recognized importance of investigating student en-gagement, in Italy a validated scale suitable for this purpose does not exist. The present work represents a first contribution to the validation in Italy of a questionnaire designed to measure student engagement in high school. By combining two separate questionnaires (i.e., the Student Engagement Scale and the Agentic Engagement Scale) within a single instrument, this study focuses on the psychometric proper-ties of a four-dimensional student engagement scale on 1,210 Italian secondary school students. Results confirm the robustness of the four-dimensional structure of the student engagement scale.