The promotion of students’ engagement with school is an internationally acknowledged challenge in education. There is a need to examine the structure of the concept of student engagement and to discover the best practices for fostering it across societies. That is why the cross-cultural invariance testing of students’ engagement measures is highly needed. This study aimed, first, to find the reduced set of theoretically valid items to represent students’ affective and cognitive engagement forming the Brief-SEI (brief version of the Student Engagement Instrument; SEI). The second aim was to test the measurement invariance of the Brief-SEI across three countries (Denmark, Finland, and Portugal). A total of 4,437 seventh-grade students completed the SEI questionnaires in the three countries. The analyses revealed that of the total 33 original instrument items, 15 items indicated acceptable psychometric properties of the Brief-SEI. With these 15 items, cross-national factorial validity and invariances across genders and students with different levels of academic performance (samples from Finland and Portugal) were demonstrated. This article discusses the utility of the Brief-SEI in cross-cultural research and its applicability in different national school contexts.

中文翻译：

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分析学生参与仪器的测量不变性

促进学生参与学校活动是国际公认的教育挑战。有必要检查学生参与概念的结构，并发现在整个社会中促进其发展的最佳实践。因此，迫切需要对学生参与度进行跨文化不变性测试。这项研究的目的是首先找到简化的理论上有效的项目集，以表示学生的情感和认知参与，从而形成Brief-SEI（学生参与工具的简称）。第二个目标是测试三个国家（丹麦，芬兰和葡萄牙）的Brief-SEI的度量不变性。在这三个国家中，共有4437名七年级学生完成了SEI问卷调查。分析显示，在总共33项原始仪器项目中，有15项表明Brief-SEI的心理测量特性可接受。通过这15个项目，证明了跨国析因效度和性别以及具有不同学业水平的学生的不变性（来自芬兰和葡萄牙的样本）。本文讨论了Brief-SEI在跨文化研究中的效用及其在不同国家学校环境中的适用性。