The promotion of students' engagement with school is an internationally acknowledged challenge in education. There is a need to examine the structure of the concept of student engagement and to discover the best practices for fostering it across societies. That is why the cross-cultural invariance testing of students' engagement measures is highly needed. This study aimed, first, to find the reduced set of theoretically valid items to represent students' affective and cognitive engagement forming the Brief-SEI (brief version of the Student Engagement Instrument; SEI). The second aim was to test the measurement invariance of the Brief-SEI across three countries (Denmark, Finland, and Portugal). A total of 4,437 seventh-grade students completed the SEI questionnaires in the three countries. The analyses revealed that of the total 33 original instrument items, 15 items indicated acceptable psychometric properties of the Brief-SEI. With these 15 items, cross-national factorial validity and invariances across genders and students with different levels of academic performance (samples from Finland and Portugal) were demonstrated. This article discusses the utility of the Brief-SEI in cross-cultural research and its applicability in different national school contexts.

This article analyses the ways in which notions of student diversity and student voice are defined in five European countries, two terms directly related to notions of inclusion. In so doing, it examines links between the two terms, noting that, often, they are used in international research without acknowledging the ways that they are defined within particular national contexts. Using literature and policy documents from five countries (i.e. Austria, Denmark, England, Portugal and Spain), the article highlights similarities as well as differences in the various contexts. Through the analysis of these texts, the paper concludes that diversity is conceptualised in five ways, although there is occasionally overlap of different conceptualisations in some of the countries. Meanwhile, the term ‘student voice’ is a term that is not used in some of the countries’ policies. Instead, other terms that relate to student voice, such as ‘participation’, are used. The paper discusses the implications of these varied understandings for the promotion of the inclusion of all students in schools.

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