title: School engagement: what it is and why it is important for positive youth development.
abstract: The observation that too many students are disengaged from school has inspired interest in the concept of school engagement. However, the growing excitement about school engagement is tempered by numerous conceptual and measurement issues. In this chapter, I briefly reviewed the history of the study of school engagement, summarized some prominent theoretical perspectives in the school engagement literature, discussed why it is important to understand the mechanism through which school engagement promotes positive youth development, and made recommendations on future research directions for this topic. Specifically, I called for a better understanding of and the nuances within the school engagement construct, advocated for the development of school engagement measures with sound psychometric property, and encouraged methodological innovations that can be used to understand the development of school engagement and its implications to positive youth development.
authors.affiliation: Education, Human Development, and the Workforce, American Institutes for Research, Washington, District of Columbia, USA.
authors.forename: Yibing
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Li
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D006801:Humans; D009042:Motivation; D009769:Object Attachment; D010552:Personality Assessment / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D010553:Personality Development; D011582:Psychological Theory; D000297:Psychology, Adolescent; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012927:Social Control, Informal; D012931:Social Environment; D012933:Social Identification; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology*