Student engagement is an important consideration when incorporating active learning activities into a classroom. To facilitate the large-scale assessment of students' engagement in activities, a survey measure must first be developed and evaluated. Therefore, the goal of this study was to create a self-report measure of student engagement for use with active learning activities in general chemistry classes. The Activity Engagement Survey (AcES) was modified from an existing survey of engagement of middle and high school science students that contained behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and social engagement items. Multiple rounds of response process interviews and factor analyses were used to modify the measure and provide evidence of validity for the data collected. The results provided support for the presence of a bifactor model, where an overall general engagement factor and the individual dimensions of engagement were simultaneously modeled. Additionally, support was found for combining behavioral and cognitive components into a single factor due to a large overlap in students' perceptions between the constructs.