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.

This thesis concerns students’ engagement with school. In Sweden there are as many as 17,5 % of the students, who after year nine do not get the grades in order to be admitted to the national program at the upper secondary school. In this thesis, Students’ experiences are focused in order to understand engagement with school. The study is grounded in a socio cultural perspective on learning where learning is considered to originate from social actions, as well as theoretical perspectives on engagement. In the thesis learning is seen as development not as a process within the child but rather as development that takes place when the child participates in practices within their cultural community and in relations with others. Learning is looked upon as a perspective where the context of our lived experience of participation in the world is important. Learning should be seen as social participation. This kind of participation does not only shape what we do but also who we are and who we can become. In this thesis the concept of engagement is considered as both the wanting to do something, and what the student actual do, the agency of the student. An exploratory sequential mixed method has been used in the data collection, mainly with a student perspective. This means that both quantitative and qualitative methods of collecting and analyzing data has been used to be able to answer the research questions. The overall aim of the thesis is to contribute with knowledge about students’ engagement in school by identifying aspects that influence the engagement. The thesis consists of three different studies. One quantitative study, where 1298 student participated in a survey concerning student engagement with school, which was followed by two qualitative studies, where the descriptive analysis was broadened with interviews, one with students and teachers in two different classes and one with students from eight different schools. Apart from that, students have written reflections on how they experience their learning environments in school. The discussion concerns whether students in year seven are engaged with their school, both according to the psychological and according to the cognitive engagement. The discussion also concerns what aspects of engagement students and their teachers in two highly engaged classes have experienced. In the study students with different socioeconomically and cultural backgrounds take part. The concepts of students’ participation and influence in their schoolwork is also discussed.

The study is part of a three-year school-improvement program in Sweden on creating inclusive learning environments, comprising several organizational levels from policy and management level to classroom praxis (http://www.ifous.se/programomraden-forskning/inkludering/). Research on inclusive education in an international context frequently focuses the placement of individual students, administrative and organizational problems and attitudes towards policy and steering documents (Forlin, Douglas & Hattie, 1996 ; Ainscow & Miles, 2008 ). Often, a praxis of exclusion is built into educational systems (Van de Putte & De Schauwer, 2013 ) where thinking of students in categories forces pedagogues into locked positions (Tetler, 2000 ). In school development, the formation of teachers into teams may play a central part as an improvement strategy (Nordholm and Blossing, 2014 ). The aim of the present study is to document and analyze the processes experienced by 32 school teams, chosen by their school leaders in 12 municipalities to implement the intentions to create inclusive learning environments in their schools. The research interest focuses how the informants describe pedagogical and didactic prerequisites and organizational conditions and how they acted when implementing inclusive learning environments in the local school context, their role and legitimacy, the support structures and the signs of change they have seen towards a more inclusive learning environment during the developmental program. The methodological approach is inspired by on-going evaluation (Ahnberg, Lundgren, Messing & von Schantz Lundgren, 2010) as a way to contribute knowledge about longitudinal developmental processes in school development close to local school context and praxis. Group interviews with the members of the teams were conducted each year in a dialogic manner with the ambition to give continuous feed back to the school teams as a way to promote developmental learning during the program. Except for visits to the schools and interviews, the researchers took part in seminars within the program and collected written documentation from the schools. The research interest concerns intentions expressed by the teams in the beginning of the program, the processes during the implementation phases and a final evaluation after three years. Data was analyzed according to qualitative content analysis and contains a rich variety of experiences and thick descriptions from the participants. Significant shifts of perspectives during the three years appear in the findings displaying how school problems and student-perspectives were understood, how the concept of inclusion was interpreted and enacted, how the teachers used analysis and reflection to promote inclusive learning environments and how frustration and insecurity among staff was transferred into collegial cooperation. The main shifts can be described in terms of taking steps from ideology to implementation, from being stuck in locked group constellations to finding flexible solutions, from seeing the teacher as the carrier of problems to collegial professionalism, and from viewing the student as the carrier of problems to analysing difficulties on several levels. School development related to inclusive learning environment is a democratic issue relevant in a Nordic as well as a global educational context and the complexity of educational organisation on different levels (Scheerens, 2015).

Allt fler elever lämnar grundskolan utan att ha nått de kunskapsmål som krävs för att bli antagna till ett nationellt program på gymnasieskolan. Ett alternativ som i dessa sammanhang erbjudits elever är det individuella programmet, numera de fem introduktionsprogrammen. Syftet med uppsatsen är att bidra med kunskap om elevers upplevelser av tiden på högstadiet, året på det individuella programmet och under tiden på nationellt program på gymnasieskolan. Uppsatsens teoretiska utgångspunkt utgörs av olika specialpedagogiska perspektiv och med ett intresse för hur elever i behov av särskilt stöd kan förstås. Tidigare forskning ger en bild av det individuella programmet som en verksamhet avskild från resten av gymnasieskolan. Vidare visar tidigare forskning att goda relationer mellan elever och lärare på det individuella programmet har stor betydelse för elevers förutsättningar för antagning till ett nationellt program. Den vetenskapsteoretiska utgångspunkten är konstruktionistisk och i föreliggande studie har data konstruerats genom livsberättelser. Tio elever har deltagit i vardera två samtal för att berätta om sina skolerfarenheter. Eleverna har det gemensamt att de efter avslutad grundskola studerat ett år på individuellt program och därefter antagits till ett nationellt program på gymnasieskolan. Fokus i analysen har både riktats mot att förstå elevernas erfarenheter av sin skoltid och mot att förstå hur skolor hanterar elevers olikheter. Resultaten kan sägas ge en förståelse för att livet i skolan, framför allt under högstadietiden, för elever i behov av särskilt stöd är präglat av utsatthet. Studiens resultat ger en bild av det individuella programmet som en utbildning där kvaliteter som delaktighet, tillhörighet och gemenskap samt skapande av meningsfulla relationer framträder. Till skillnad från grundskolan synes det individuella programmet ge eleverna i studien möjlighet att nå kunskapsmålen för att antas till nationellt program vid gymnasieskolan.