Student engagement is one of the most important issues in the contemporary educational system (Conner and Fraser, 2011; Jang et al., 2010). Today, educational researchers worldwide promote student engagement to enhance students’ experiences in schools as one of the strategies of increasing their participation to the educational opportunities made available to them (Kraft and Dougherty, 2013; Shernoff et al., 2017). In Tanzania, students’ participation in the secondary education opportunities has become the projecting national agenda since the launch of the Secondary Education Development Programme ­ (SEDP 2004-2009 - phase I). The SEDP is built on the national and international reforms regarding the education sector as stipulated in the documents such as Tanzania Development Vision 2025 and the National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty (NSGRP) (URT, 2004). Nevertheless, the issue of student engagement in Tanzania is still at its infancy stage. There is scant literature (Kihwele 2014; Makewa et al. 2013; and Hilliard 2014) with scant information about student engagement. Most of these studies focus comprehensively on the efficiency of schools and the immediate outcomes of educational processes, with little information on student engagement with schooling. Principally, engaging students properly with their schooling, not only facilitates effective participation with schooling but also make them graduate with desirable outcomes for them to be able to face many recurring global challenges including the recently emerged COVID 19 pandemic.

Current studies on student engagement across the world acknowledge the fact that wider student experience with schooling should be studied using diverse dimensions (emotional, behavioural and cognitive) of student engagement (Finn et al., 1995; Fredricks et al., 2004; Morse et al., 2004). These dimensions are interrelated and interactive within the individual and therefore they have to be studied simultaneously. Emotional engagement ranges from simple liking to deep valuing of, or identification with, the institution. Behavioural engagement ranges from simply doing the work and following the rules to participate in the student council and other school related activities. Cognitive engagement ranges from simple memorization to the use of self-regulated learning strategies that promote deep understanding and expertise. The differences within each dimension suggest that engagement varies in intensity within an individual (Fredricks et al., 2004; Wigfield, 2015). Furthermore, student engagement is responsive to the interactions of the individual students and the school contextual environments (Connell and Zheng, 2003; Finn and Rock, 1997). This means student engagement is influenced by the tangible and intangible opportunities schools provide to the students, which results to the effects such as increased learning or decreased dropouts.

This study therefore, aimed at assessing the levels of affective, behavioural and cognitive engagement of form II – IV students from the selected government secondary schools in Mtwara and Dar es Salaam regions. Besides, the study also assessed whether the engagement levels of students from Normal Secondary Schools (NSS) vary from that of Secondary Schools with Advanced Level of education (SSAL).  Therefore, the following research question guided this study;

(a)    What are the emotional, behavioural and cognitive engagement levels of all secondary school students at the selected schools?

(b)   What differences are there in levels of emotional, behavioural and cognitive engagement between the NSS and SSAL students?

The data for this study were collected by means of questionnaire method. The first part of the questionnaire dealt with respondents’ demographic information. The second part of the questionnaire consisted of psychometric scale items which partly was adopted from Learning and Attitude to school scale (ILSS), PISA 2000 studies and School Context Scales developed by Akey (2006) whose construct validity and internal reliably were high to be trusted to be adopted. The items were then categorized to measure students’ attitudes and perceptions. This study involved 1041 students from a total population of 8212 students. The respondents were obtained through two stages of cluster sampling technique. Each technique was followed by random sampling procedure. The first stage involved clustering the districts by regions. This was followed by random sampling procedure to obtain two districts from each cluster. The second stage involved clustering the schools by districts. Four schools were then selected randomly from each cluster of districts, giving a total of 16 secondary schools. The third stage involved random selection of respondents from form II – IV students from the selected secondary schools in Dar es Salaam and Mtwara regions. The collected data were entered in SPSS version 21 for cleaning ready for descriptive and inferential statistics. The 37 items were confirmed to be useful for studying student engagement after being rotated through Principal component analysis. Its construct validity was determined using promax rotation. The 37 items were then studied and categorized into three dimensions of engagement: emotional, behavioural and cognitive using their construct structures. Emotional engagement was measured by using 13 items, behavioural engagement by 14 items and cognitive engagement by 9 items. Then, each item in each dimension was computed to explore its Mean, Median, Mode and Standard deviation. Thereafter, they were categorized into the types of schools, NSS and SSAL in order to elicit a big picture of the categories of schools under study.

The study revealed that all secondary school students demonstrated moderate low level of behavioral engagement compared with the other engagement dimensions. Comparing cognitive engagement and emotional engagement, students were found to have higher emotional engagement than cognitive. This implies that students at form II – IV class levels are more strongly attached with the school as a social institution, making them put less effort to the learning materials they encounter in different lessons. Their participation in different school activities is less compared to the efforts they put in learning materials. The differences between the two categories of school levels were found solely on behavioural engagement. In the other two dimensions the schools levels showed similarities. NSS students demonstrated higher levels of behavioural engagement than students in SSAL. Contact within NSS students increases the bonds among themselves by reducing unreasonable dislike of others and feelings of worries about others. This implies that social bond among NSS students increases behavioural engagement, which is not the case with SSAL. Since the participation of students in the secondary education opportunities has become the projecting national agenda, it should be supported by secondary education curriculum that engages students with the educational opportunities the government provides. When students exhibit insufficient engagement in one dimension, it might affect another dimension and in the long run distract their whole participation with school and their future life. All school categories should be effective enough to boost student engagement in all dimensions. This could be done by ensuring conducive school environment in all categories of schools to encourage students to participation. The collaboration among the government, the school administrators, teachers and other educational providers should is recommended to formulate the effective and ideal student participation in acquiring their education.

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