Research on school engagement has a long tradition in understanding students' feelings of connection with their academic surroundings, values surrounding educational goals (Orthner, Jones-Sanpei, Akos & Rose, 2013), and participation in academic success (Orthner et al., 2013). High engagement with school can be linked to students' overall success and is of fundamental importance for understanding positive youth development (Li & Lerner, 2011). Engagement with school is characterized by several components, including students' sense of belonging, identification with school, and a sense of relatedness, whereas academic engagement refers to time on task, earned credits, and homework completion (Salmela-Aro & Upadyaya, 2013). The affective or emotional component refers to students' enjoyment and interest in school-related challenges, positive and negative reactions to teachers and classmates, and willingness to do one's schoolwork. The cognitive component, in turn, refers to students’ investment in schoolwork, as well as their thoughtfulness and willingness to learn and exert the necessary effort while studying. Finally, the behavioral component is described in terms of involvement, being present at school, and complying with school discipline rules (Salmela-Aro & Upadyaya, 2013). The concepts of three school engagement dimensions also describe students’ participation, commitment, positive and negative emotions, investment, and willingness to exert effort in one’s schoolwork, all of which refer to patterns rather than causes behind one’s actions. Thus, school engagement can be described as a multidimensional, developing, and malleable construct, including students’ (Carter, Reschly, Lovelace, Appleton & Thompson, 2012).

Normally, girls often exhibit higher levels of behavioral, emotional, and overall school engagement than boys (Li, Lynch, Kalvin, Lin & Lerner, 2011; Salmela-Aro & Upadyaya, 2012; Wang & Eccles, 2012), which may be related to girls’ tendency to perform better at school. Students from lower-income families are more likely than girls and higher socioeconomic status students to experience rapid decreases and follow unstable school engagement trajectories, often leading to school dropouts (Li & Lerner, 2011). 

Experiences of belonging, positive relationships, autonomy, and competence are essential to psychological well-being; they provide the psychological “nutriments” or “resources” that sustain and enhance autonomous motivation and the engagement, persistence, and effort that flow from it. Moreover, if one or more of these nutriments is thwarted or denied, we quickly experience negative impacts on well-being, performance, and motivation (Dotterer & Lowe, 2012). Student mental well-being will be supported when teaching and learning practices actively engage students' intrinsic interests and communicate the importance and value of the knowledge and skills being developed. In this sense, students that are engaged in their classes and their universities express more good feelings, good relationships, and accomplishment, and these elements are essential for improving well-being.

In this study, we sought to explore the relationship between the involvement of 1st-year students in the university according to age and gender. Since we have students attending both day and night classes, we decided to establish age categories between 19-23 and more than 23. The research hypotheses to be evaluated are the following: Q1: students’ school engagement in the 1st year varies according to age. Q2: students’ school engagement in the 1st year varies according to gender (male/female). One hundred university students attending the 1st year participated in this study. Participants have a mean age between 19 and 57 years old and a mean of 23.9 (SD: 6.6).

In the present study, participants are students in the 1st cycle of undergraduate studies in the area of social sciences at a university in Lisbon, who gave their informed consent to participate in the study. One hundred surveys were answered, of which 70 were female and 30 were male, with the students' ages varying between 19 and 57 years old. In the present study, the Student Involvement Scale at the University was used: A QuadriDimensional Scale (EAE-E4D) constructed by Veiga (2013) and validated in a sample with 685 students from the 6th, 7th, 9th, and 10th years of schooling from various regions of Portugal. This scale contains 20 items with a Likert-type response, ranging from 1 (total disagreement) to 6 (total agreement). Each of the dimensions of involvement is assessed using a set of five items. For example, some items stand out in each of the four dimensions: cognitive (e.g., "When I am Reading, I try to understand the meaning of what the author wants to convey"); affectively (e.g., “My school is a place where I make friends easily”); behavioral (e.g., “I'm distracted in class”) and agentive (e.g., “During classes, I intervene to express my opinions”). For the different dimensions, the scale's internal consistency values (Cronbach's Alpha) varied between the maximum value of .87 for the agentive dimension and the minimum value of .69 for the behavioral dimension (Veiga, 2013). In the present study, the Covas scale (2017) was selected, as this scale encompasses four dimensions of involvement and is revised by the author for higher education, whereas the Veiga scale (2013) was validated for compulsory education. The research respected fundamental ethical principles with the protection of participants, their informed consent, confidentiality, privacy, and protection of data collection. Thus, participants were informed by researchers who explained the objectives of the investigation, the voluntary nature of participation, ensuring confidentiality, privacy, and anonymity of responses. The instrument was administered in the classroom and subject to the same conditions for two 1st-year classes of social and human sciences at a University of Lisbon. The collected data were directly exported to SPSS statistical analysis software database, version 23. In terms of statistical procedures used, descriptive statistical analysis was carried out for the general characterization of the sample; an inferential analysis was carried out to understand the homogeneity of the variables, and then a correlational analysis was carried out between variables and by dimension.

Firstly, the results on the characterization of students' school involvement in the study with a minimum age of 19 and a maximum of 57; the average age was 23.9 years (SD: 6.6). Regarding the four dimensions of the scale, we found that the behavioral scale had the best average, 24.7, and the agentive scale had the worst average, 13.1 (SD: 3-8 and 5.8, respectively). In the first group (19-22 years old), there were very similar averages on the cognitive and affective scales (19.3 and 19.8), and on the behavioral scale, we obtained a higher average than the previous two (24.0) with the scale agency (12.0). We can conclude that in this age group, there are very adjusted behaviors towards study involvement, with cognitive and affective involvement having lower values. In terms of agentive involvement, this presents a very low value, indicating that there is no proactivity in the appropriation and integration of learning. In the second group (23-57 years old), the average on the four scales is slightly higher than the previous group, however, with the same pattern, the behavioral scale presenting the highest average value (25.6) and the average values of the cognition and affective scales with very similar values (20 and 20.6), respectively. Regarding sex, we found that in the group under 23 years old, 52 girls and 9 boys participated. It can be seen that the behavioral scale continues to have higher averages than other scales. In the group over 23 years old, the behavioral scale and the agency scale stand out with lower values compared to others.

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