The Scale of Student Engagement in Statistics: Development and Initial Validation

Abstract

Student engagement has been a focal point of research, partly due to its efficacy in promoting long-term academic success. However, many scales are designed to measure engagement across the school setting rather than within specific classes. Though some accomplish the latter, there are even fewer designed to measure student engagement for course-specific material as opposed to generalized classroom engagement. The Scale of Student Engagement in Statistics was developed to better understand and measure the structure of student engagement at this micro level, resulting in a three-factor structure of engagement consisting of affective, behavioral, and cognitive features. The use of the full- and subscale scores were validated and their utility in predicting academic outcomes was demonstrated. This new measure is a crucial step in researching how students engage with introductory statistics courses and provides a scaffold to measure student engagement in other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects.