A review of relevant literatures led to the construction of a self-report instrument designed to measure two subtypes of student engagement with school: cognitive and psychological engagement. The psychometric properties of this measure, the Student Engagement Instrument (SEI), were assessed based on responses of an ethnically and economically diverse urban sample of 1931 ninth grade students. Factor structures were obtained using exploratory factor analyses (EFAs) on half of the dataset, with model fit examined using confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) on the other half of the dataset. The

Evaluators are frequently asked to assess the effectiveness of school programs implemented to improve academic achievement. School connectedness has been shown to be directly related to academic achievement and is therefore of interest to evaluators. The construct of school connectedness has been shown to consist of 3 elements: connectedness to adults in schools, connectedness to peers, and connectedness to the school. This paper reports the psychometric properties and factor analyses findings from a School Connectedness Scale (SCS) given to adolescents in 2 very different high schools in the

In this chapter, I discuss the development, piloting and revision of a new instrument for measuring pre/post the academic self-efficacy of students. The initial motivation for the creation of this new instrument came from an unsuccessful search for an instrument to measure self-efficacy in an NSF-funded project designed to investigate the motivational effects of a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) on the science achievement of middle-school students. However, individual sections of the new instrument can contribute in general to the more-finely discriminated measurement of self-efficacy

The Upper Elementary (4-5th) and the Middle and High School (6-12th) Student Attitudes toward STEM Surveys (S-STEM) each contain four scales (sets of surveys items that most confidently describe a single characteristic of the survey-taker when the responses to these items are calculated as a single result). The first five scales consists of Likert-scale questions which ask the respondent about their confidence and attitudes toward math, science, engineering and technology, and 21st century learning respectively. Final items in the surveys ask students about their attitudes toward 12 different