| The goal of my dissertation was to examine trajectories of three dimensions of adolescents' school engagement during their middle- and high-school years, and investigate how school engagement differed as a function of both individual characteristics and school climate. Participants in the sample were part of the Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study , a longitudinal study of approximately 1,000 adolescents from 23 public schools in an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse county on the east coast of United States.;In my first study, I examined a second-order multidimensional factor model of school engagement. The results of my confirmatory factor analyses suggested that school engagement was a multidimensional construct, with evidence to support the hypothesized second-order factor structure of the behavioral, emotional, and cognitive dimensions of engagement. When testing factorial invariance, I found that boys and girls did not differ substantially from each other, nor did European-American and African-American students, in the underlying engagement constructs and the composition of these constructs.;In my second study, I investigated developmental trajectories of adolescents' school engagement (i.e., school participation, school belonging, and self-regulated learning) from 7th through 11th grades and examined how these growth trajectories differed by gender and ethnicity. In addition, I investigated how various dimensions of school engagement contributed to adolescents' academic performance and truancy. My results revealed that school participation and school belonging to school decreased between grades 7 and 11, while self-regulated learning increased, on average. These growth trajectories differed by gender and ethnicity. In addition, when school engagement was examined as a multidimensional construct, the various dimensions of school engagement contributed differently to academic performance and truancy.;In my third study, I examined the relationships among middle-school adolescents' perceptions of school climate, achievement motivation, and school engagement (behavioral participation, school identification, and self-regulated learning). I found that adolescents' perceptions of distinct dimensions of school climate in 7th grade contributed differentially to the three types of school engagement in 8th grade. In addition, I found that adolescents' perceptions of school climate in 7th grade influenced their three types of school engagement in 8th grade directly, as well as indirectly through achievement motivation. |
