Student engagement is a multifaceted concept to describe students’ experiences of school. It is to describe students’ commitment and their views on meaningfulness and significance of school and education for them personally. In many cases engagement has replaced the concept of quality of school life as an outcome indicator to explain students’ well-being in academic environment. As part of the motivational system it can offer a more pedagogically oriented interpretation of the students’ inner experiences of school life.

Engagement is largely understood from three perspectives: cognitive, affective and academic behavior. Cognitive engagement refers to person’s goal-setting in education and conscious strives to achieve good performance: the student knows that school / education is important and valuable him/her personally in the life course. Affective engagement refers to the emotional experiences in the school / education environment. If those experiences are positive it will support success in school. Academic behavior refers to the students’ investment in education: spending time to learn, accepting even discomfort that high expectations might set, and taking regular care of all the demands that school work will set. Behavioral engagement can be described as commitment with work in the school / education environment.

Assessing student engagement might contribute to the school performance: high engagement has been proved to be linked with high performance. Therefore it is of great value for the teachers to understand the relevance of engagement to improve school performance including all developmentally important areas: not only cognitive but also social and emotional development of children and youth. It has been proved that the correspondence of students’ self-evaluated and teachers’ evaluated affective engagement is rather low, which means that teachers do not quite know the students’ inner feelings about school.

In the symposia current research on student engagement will be presented in four European countries. In Denmark, Finland, Portugal and Sweden there has been going on research projects to analyze student engagement in junior high schools. The data has been collected using Student Engagement Instrument developed by Appleton, Christenson and Reschly in US. The comparative findings will be discussed in Nordic and South European educational context. It will also be discussed how the notion of engagement can be used in improving teachers’ capacity to create a learning culture in their classrooms which is characterized by a high degree of student engagement and participation.