The Comprehensive Assessment of Student Engagement (CASE): Scale Development and Evaluation

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-18-2025

Abstract

Student engagement is critical for learning, persistence, retention, and other outcomes that matter to students and universities, yet there is little agreement about how the concept is defined and measured. The literature is unclear on whether aspects of burnout reflect low engagement or burnout is a separate construct. This construct ambiguity makes it difficult to develop a coherent body of scholarship about how pedagogical and institutional choices impact student engagement and how student engagement affects important student and institutional outcomes. The primary goal of this paper is the development and evaluation of a new comprehensive measure of student engagement drawing on the literatures on personal, student, school and job engagement and burnout. Toward this end, we conducted three studies. Study 1 examines the factor structure that emerges from a comprehensive set of items from published instruments in the engagement and burnout literature. Results indicate that student engagement is comprised of six dimensions: Enthusiasm, Exhaustion, Effort, Social Interaction, Resilience, and Focus. Study 2 focuses on the development and initial psychometric evaluation of a novel measure of student engagement based on the six factors. Study 3 provides additional psychometric evaluation of the new measure of student engagement. Together results across the three studies provide considerable support for a 24-item (four items per dimension) measure of student engagement with a consistent stem that can be modified to customize the referent of the questions. We provide evidence for reliability and validity of the 24-item scale as well as each of the six subscales.

Comments

Originally published in the Academy of Management Proceedings

Publication Title

Academy of Management Proceedings

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5465/AMPROC.2025.10845abstract

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