The concept of school engagement has attracted increasing attention as representing a possible antidote to declining academic motivation and achievement. Engagement is presumed to be malleable, responsive to contextual features, and amenable to environmental change. Researchers describe behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement and recommend studying engagement as a multifaceted construct. This article reviews definitions, measures, precursors, and outcomes of engagement; discusses limitations in the existing research; and suggests improvements. The authors conclude that, although much has been learned, the potential contribution of the concept of school engagement to research on student experience has yet to be realized. They call for richer characterizations of how students behave, feel, and think—research that could aid in the development of finely tuned interventions

The purpose of this study was to document gender differences in children's competence and value beliefs (N =514) from the 1st through 12th grades and to investigate the relation of these trends to initial differences in parents' perceptions of children's ability. Six separate growth models were tested: math competence, math interest, math importance, sports competence, sports interest, and sports importance. Across all 6 models, children's self-perceptions declined from 1st grade to 12th grade. Gender differences in competence and value beliefs were found. The gap between boys' and girls' competence beliefs decreased over time. In addition, parents' initial ratings of children's ability helped to explain mean level differences and variations in the rate of change in children's beliefs over time, with the effect being strongest in the sports models.

One of the challenges with research on student engagement is the large variation in the measurement of this construct, which has made it challenging to compare fi ndings across studies. This chapter contributes to our understanding of the measurement of student in engagement in three ways. First, we describe strengths and limitations of different methods for assessing student engagement (i.e., self-report measures, experience sampling techniques, teacher ratings, interviews, and observations). Second, we compare and contrast 11 self-report survey measures of student engagement that have been used in prior research. Across these 11 measures, we describe what is measured (scale name and items), use of measure, samples, and the extent of reliability and validity information available on each measure. Finally, we outline limitations with current approaches to measurement and promising future directions.

The authors examined the relations between participation in a range of high school extracurricular contexts and developmental outcomes in adolescence and young adulthood among an economically diverse sample of African American and European American youths. In general, when some prior self-selection factors were controlled, 11th graders' participation in school clubs and organized sports was associated with concurrent indicators of academic and psychological adjustment and with drug and alcohol use. In addition, participation in 11th grade school clubs and prosocial activities was associated with educational status and civic engagement at 1 year after high school. A few of the concurrent and longitudinal relations between activity participation and development were moderated by race and gender. Finally, breadth of participation, or number of activity contexts, was associated with positive academic, psychological, and behavioral outcomes.

In this chapter we review the research on the development of children's motivation and engagement. We organize our review into four major sections: the development of children's achievement motivation; gender, cultural, and ethnic differences in children's motivation; socialization of motivation in the family; and socialization of motivation in school. We take a social‐cognitive expectancy‐value theoretical perspective to organize our discussion of this work. We first discuss the development of children's motivation and engagement and take another look at the often‐observed decline in motivation, focusing on new work showing different patterns in these declines among different groups of children. We also discuss how children's motivation relates to their performance and choice, two kinds of outcomes of major importance to children's healthy development. The second major section discusses gender, ethnic, and cultural differences in children's motivation and the important advances researchers have made in understanding these over the past 10 years. In the family and school socialization sections we focus on processes by which parents, teachers, and schools can impact children's motivation both positively and negatively. We note the similarities of these processes across socializers: Providing appropriate challenges and emotional warmth and support, and having high expectations for children. We discuss the need for more integrative studies of how parents and also teachers impact children's motivation. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of important future directions: A continuing focus on culture and motivation, further examination of motivation in specific domains and contexts, a stronger focus on biological influences on the development of motivation, and a consideration of unconscious processes and their impact on the development of motivation.