Research suggests the need to assess both positive and negative forms of student engagement. The purpose of this study was to pilot disaffection items with the Student Engagement Instrument (SEI) with a sample of middle school students from a rural area in the Southeastern U.S. This study explored the factor structure of the piloted items…

Student engagement is associated with various aspects of students' school experiences, including student achievement, high school completion, and post-secondary success. As measurement of student engagement has grown in countries around the world, few studies have been conducted in South America. This study examined a translated version of the…

This study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Student Engagement Instrument--College version (SEI--C) with college students in the southeastern United States. Participants self-selected paper-and-pencil or online administration. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed a modified 5-factor structure. Measurement invariance of the modified…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether secondary student engagement was predictive of college attendance. Data were drawn from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 9th grade (n = 21,444) and 11th grade (n = 20,549) cohorts. Multilevel modeling was used to analyze whether demographic, academic, financial, and engagement variables…

Early warning systems use school record data--such as attendance rate, behavior records, and course performance--to identify students at risk of dropping out. These are useful predictors of graduation-related outcomes, in large part because they indicate a student's level of engagement with school. However, these data do not indicate how invested…

The Student Engagement Instrument (SEI) is a self-report measure of cognitive and affective engagement with school. Prior SEI validation studies have focused primarily on construct validity through analyses of internal consistency, factor analysis, and measurement invariance. Results are presented here from a two-pronged study of the criterion…

This study evaluated the psychometric properties of two measures of student engagement, the Student Engagement Instrument (SEI) and the Motivation-Engagement Scale (MES), with adolescents in the southeastern United States. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed an acceptable fit of the SEI and a relatively poor fit of the MES in this sample.…

The issue of high school dropout has long concerned policy makers, educational professionals, and the general public. In the gifted literature, this concern is no less pressing. Student engagement is becoming an increasingly discussed construct for conceptualizing the dropout phenomenon and designing appropriate interventions to prevent this…

Early school withdrawal, commonly referred to as dropout, is associated with a plethora of negative outcomes for students, schools, and society. Student engagement, however, presents as a promising theoretical model and cornerstone of school completion interventions. The purpose of the present study was to validate the Student Engagement…

This article argues that reading interventions are a key dropout prevention strategy. A review of the literature connects reading skills and interventions with events such as grade retention, placement in special education, and high school dropout. In general, data indicate that intensive early interventions positively affect students' reading…

Proponents of positive psychology have argued for more comprehensive assessments incorporating positive measures (e.g., student strengths) as well as negative measures (e.g., psychological symptoms). However, few variable-centered studies have addressed the incremental validity of positive assessment data. The authors investigated the incremental…

The construct of student engagement is increasingly prevalent in the field of education, serving as the foundation of dropout prevention and high school reform initiatives. The purpose of this study was to further examine 1 measure of student engagement, the Student Engagement Instrument (SEI), designed to measure 2 subtypes of student engagement:…

Check & Connect was created in a five year period from 1990 to 1995. The original manual, entitled "Keeping Kids in School: Using Check & Connect for Dropout Prevention" and written by David Evelo, Mary Sinclair, Christine Hurley, Sandra Christenson, and Martha Thurlow, was published in 1996 (ED398701). This newly revised Check…