Abstract:

In order to be able to talk about successful educational outcomes in higher education, universities should have qualified and rich educational practices and their students should be actively involved in the education and training activities of the institution. Students’ interests, aspirations, attitudes, values and behaviours about the university and educational practices affect their academic and social adaptation hakwith the university and this situation is reflected in their school attendance, academic development and success. Accordingly, engagement as a result of the adaptation of students with the academic and social systems of the university is highly important for the school life of the students due to its relationship with academic development and achievement. In this study, it was aimed to develop a scale that would reveal the academic engagement of university students and that could include different components of the behavioural dimension of student engagement. The study group consisted of 882 senior students at a public university in Turkey. As a result of the exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses applied to the scale, a 25-item structure with three sub-dimensions was revealed. The sub-dimensions of the scale are named as “participation in the course, library, resource access”, “communication with faculty members” and “participation in scientific and cultural activities”. While the Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient for the whole scale is .91, the Cronbach alpha reliability coefficients for each sub-dimension are between .78 and .90. All findings indicate that the Academic Engagement Scale is reliable and valid for measuring academic engagement of university students.

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