Italian Higher Education Student Engagement Scale (I-HESES): initial validation and psychometric evidences

Student engagement is an important construct predicting students' academic achievement and success. In order to broaden the choice of short, complete, effective, and Italian language scales for the measurement of this construct, the goal of the present study was to carry out an adaptation and initial validation, accompanied by appropriate psychometric analyses, of an Italian version of the Higher Education Student Engagement Scale (I-HESES) in a sample of 335 Swiss-Italian and South-Italian adult students. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses permitted to validate the Italian adapted version of the HESES, resulting in an instrument with three second order dimensions (academic engagement, psychological engagement and social engagement) each one having two subdimensions. Each subdimension is measured using three items. The internal consistencies were adequate for all subscales, ranging from .63 to .86. Evidence of partial strong measurement invariance across gender and countries was observed. Moreover, as expected, the I-HESES dimensions were meaningfully related to student self-efficacy and value accorded to education. These findings indicate that the I-HESES might be a valid instrument for assessing and studying student engagement of adults attending higher education in the Swiss-Italian and South-Italian contexts.