<p><em>The main purpose </em><em>of this study is to investigate whether emotional, cognitive and behavioral engagements, represents three conceptually and empirically distinct psychological constructs when studied within the same domain. This paper reports part of the findings from a major study entitled “Predictors of Self-Handicapping Behavior among Muslim Students”. Testing for factorial equivalence of scores from a measuring instrument was carried-out through structural equation modeling by using AMOS version 16.</em><em> </em><em>Results of Confirmatory Factor Analysis of responses from 790 undergraduates prove that the SEM three factor model of University Student Engagement (USE) is empirically fit and reliable, which also supports the argument that emotion, behavior and cognition are the student engagement manifestations of an interrelated constellation of academic student engagement. </em></p>

As a preliminary step to studying the reciprocal relationship between student engagement and academic self-handicapping, the present study had the aim of validating two key instruments on the target non-western population. The two instrruments in question were 1)  the Self-Handicapping Questionnaire (SHQ 2011), and 2) the Student Engagement Questionnaire (SEQ 2011)  which consists of i) the Emotional Engagement Scale, ii) the Behavioral Engagement Scale, and iii) the Cognitive Engagement Scale. We wanted to discover the psychometric properties of these instruments when used on an Asian  Muslim population, in a predominantly Muslim setting. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were employed. Results indicated that both measures had adequate validity and reliability when used on a Muslim population.   Abstrak:     Kajian ini bertujuan untuk mengesahkan dua instrumen utama atas penduduk sasaran - bukan Barat sebagai langkah awal untuk mempelajari hubungan timbal balik antara penglibatan pelajar dan kelakuan akademik handicapping diri. Dua instrumen tersebut adalah 1) Soal selidik Self-Handicapping (SHQ 2011), dan 2) soal selidik penglibatan pelajar (SEQ 2011) yang terdiri daripada i) skala penglibatan emosi, ii) skala penglibatan tingkah laku dan kognitif, dan iii) skala penglibatan. Penyelidik ingin mengetahui ciri-ciri psikometrik instrumen-instrumen tersebut apabila digunakan ke atas umat Islam di Asia, dalam suasana yang kebanyakannya beragama Islam. Analisis komponen utama (PCA) dan analisis faktor pengesahan (CFA) telah digunakan. Keputusan menunjukkan bahawa kedua-dua instrumen memenuhi keesahan dan kebolehpercayaan apabila digunakan ke atas penduduk Islam.

<p><em>The main purpose of this study is to validate the three instruments applied in studying the relationship between Religious Commitment, Peer Relations and Behavior of secondary school adolescents (Mwita, 2010). The greatest challenge in understanding the behavior of people is the adequate measurement of abstract construct (Hinkin</em><em>, </em><em>1989). Thus confirmatory factor analysis was conducted, and factors derived from all the three instruments were then explored by orthogonal rotations. Three factors were extracted from the behavior items, two from the peer relations items and two from the religious commitment items. Reliability scores between the constructs indicated statistically significant difference on the latent factors of all the three instruments. Constructs were further validated by determining </em><em>Average Variance Extracted (AVE) where high scores of AVE (between 0.8 &amp; 0.9) and high factor scores of ?.4 (Hair et al</em><em>.</em><em>, 2010) </em><em>were obtained. Finally, constructs were validated by applying SEM which proved the validity of all the constructs by obtaining good fit indices.</em></p>

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