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 paper offers insights into learning experiences in inclusive classrooms, gained by giving voices to pupils about their perceptions of themselves and their opinions on classroom climate. A positive response pattern is identified concerning academic and social dimensions of schools, while the overall picture concerning the dimension of participation is more blurred. The paper argues for further explorations of the concept of educational participation in inclusive settings, not only with a focus upon the psychological classroom climate aspects, but also upon the pedagogical and didactic processes that constitute the learning conditions for pupils with disabilities included in mainstream classrooms. Setting the stageIn Scandinavian countries, the idea of including all learners in mainstream schools has been accepted for decades. The question, however, is whether this is an ideal rather than actual practice, as the practice seems often to fall short of the mark. Scandinavian research literature indicates several problematic experiences for pupils placed in inclusive settings (Emanuelsson

Denne rapport udgør en redegørelse for status for inklusionsprocessen i tolv danske kommuner pr. marts 2013. Den samlede undersøgelse, der går under navnet 'Dokumentationsprojektet', løber i tre år og blev givet til et konsortium bestående af Aarhus Universitet og SFI den 16. januar 2013, og der har derfor vaeret meget kort tid til at få indsamlet og behandlet de nødvendige data, bl.a. fordi der i den korte periode indgik både en vinterferie, en påskeferie og en influenzaepidemi. De udvalgte kommuner har ikke desto mindre alle stillet positivt op til et samarbejde, men det viste sig, at indsamlingen af data fra skoleledere, skolebestyrelsesformaend, laerere og elever blev påvirket af en meget kort tidsramme for indtastning, forhandlinger om overenskomst, og besvarelsesprocenterne er derfor under det, der kunne ønskes. Rapporten er udarbejdet af seniorforsker Siddhartha Bavistar, SFI, postdoc Camilla Brørup Dyssegaard, AU, professor Niels Egelund, AU, seniorforsker Mette Lausten, SFI, og professor Susan Tetler, AU. Susan Tetler har vaeret projektleder, mens Niels Egelund har vaeret kontaktperson. Ud over forfatterne til denne rapport har forskningsassistent Hilde Ulvseth, AU, ph.d.-stipendiat Charlotte Riis Jensen, AU, arbejdet med transskription af interview, lektor Anne Morin, AU, og lektor Lotte Hedegaard-Sørensen, AU, har vaeret projektdeltagere, og studentermedhjaelp Sigrid Trier Grønfeldt, SFI, har udtrukket og bearbejdet de kvantitative registerdata, der var til rådighed. Sidst, men ikke mindst skal lyde en tak til de medvirkende skolechefer, PPRledere, skoleledere, laerere og skolebestyrelsesformaend, der under stort tidspres har leveret saerdeles nyttige informationer for undersøgelsen.

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