The Development and Validation of Student Engagement Questionnaire

Abstract

Introduction: Medical students drop out rate in Pakistan is very high. In our country, only 84% of students graduate, which is significantly lower than the average for developing nations. Class engagement, has been identified as a solution to the failures, dropouts and motivational lacking of students. Being multifaceted construct, the problems of defining engagement have also led to inconsistencies in measurements too. Most of the previous student engagement questionnaires had lack of information regarding their reliability and validity, transparency and auditability. They were long and complex to understand and only measures the behavioral and social engagement. So there is a need to develop questionnaires that is short, freely available and can easily be understood by all stakeholders involved in teaching and learning.

Aims & Objectives: To develop a questionnaire to assess the engagement of undergraduate medical students during classroom activities.

Place and Duration of Study: This was mixed method study, conducted at the University College of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Lahore between November 2022 &May 2023under the guidelines of AMEE Guide 87.

Material & Methods: After receiving consent, the first draft of the questionnaire was distributed to 14 clinical and basic science subject experts, as well as medical educators, for qualitative and content validation. To determine the response process and to address any misunderstandings regarding the significance of questionnaire items, cognitive interviews with six students were conducted. Responses from 210 undergraduate medical and dentistry students were used to gauge reliability. SPSS version 23 was used to evaluate the questionnaires, a p-value of ?0.05 was considered significant For the scale, an internal consistency of between 0.50 and 0.70 according to Cronbach's alpha was deemed sufficient

Results: There were 14 experts who gave qualitative expert validation. The initial student engagement questionnaire contained 49 items to measure 5 theoretical constructs, and were modified to make them more comprehensible and applicable. The questionnaire’s overall scale validity index was 0.84. After the cognitive interviews, there were just twenty items left. Content validation was finished in two rounds with 20 final items, yielding acceptable values of SI- CVI 0.83 & CCA 2.8. After the questionnaire had undergone pilot testing, 210 students filled it out, and the reliability of the survey was evaluated using Cronbach's alpha, which came out to be 0.721.

Conclusion: Medical colleges can use this valid and reliable student engagement questionnaire to assess students' emotional, behavioral, and cognitive involvement in class.