Engagement and Self-Regulation Scale for Higher Education Students (ESR): Development and Psychometric Properties

Abstract

In the current university education scenario, various aspects are evident that negatively affect students' academic performance and increase dropout levels during the first year. In this context, one of the relevant factors is to analyze the engagement and self-regulation of learning as input for designing strategies with a clear intention of facilitating learning. Hence the importance to develop appropriate instruments to investigate how engaged the students are with their training process, a situation that affects self-regulation of learning, which is a crucial skill in a student's success. For this reason, this work aims to develop and analyze the scale's psychometric properties that allow knowing about the engagement and self-regulation of student learning in the face of schoolwork and their role in learning. The measures are based on a multidimensional perspective of the engagement-self-regulation construct through structural equations. The sample was recruited from a population of first-year college students. The results confirmed that students' engagement and self-regulation comprise multiple related but distinct dimensions. This is evidenced by the standardized factor loadings, which presented values above 0.6, and the calculated Average Variance Extracted, which presented values equal to or greater than 0.5. There was also empirical evidence supporting measurement invariance and predictive validity. Specifically, the differences in CFI and RMSEA were determined to be equal to or below 0.01 and 0.015, respectively. These findings demonstrate the robustness of the scale's psychometric properties.