Measuring Academic Engagement among School Students: A Scale Construction

The purpose of the present study was to construct a tool to measure academic engagement among school students and to test the tool's usability. An exploratory cross-sectional study was conducted in this tool construction. The processes include - conceptualization and generation of items with five-point responses, relevant judgement of these items, item validity and identification of factor hierarchical structure, determining psychometric properties of tool. The study was done based on 401 adolescent school students of Tripura state of India, selected through purposive sampling technique and statistical analyses was done using IBM SPSS 22.The S-CVI results show .87 ( S-CVI/average) which indicates high content validity of overall academic engagement scale. EFA on this scale reveals a) initiation, b) Maintaining attention, c)using engagement strategy d) exploration e) Outcome Analysis f)Persistence g) Disengagement Strategy making h) valence in academic process as 8 components among 49 items. Two second order components 'Perceived valence of academic process' and 'execution' were extracted from these eight factors. Satisfactory Internal consistency of 8 principal components using Cronbach Alpha (.632 -.768) were found. The tool is effective in assessing the academic engagement of adolescent school students.