Student Engagement in Vietnamese Higher Education (V-EIHES): The Relationship Between Learning Environment, Engagement, and Academic Achievement

Student engagement is a critical factor in predicting academic achievement and success. Given the complexity of this concept and also to expand the available short, comprehensive, and effective scale in the literature in Vietnam for measuring this construct, the present study aimed to expand the Higher Education Student Engagement Scale in the Vietnamese context (V_EiHES) to include agentic engagement and then to explore the relationship between student satisfaction with the learning environment, student engagement, and academic success. Data were collected from 1,324 students from a university in Ho Chi Minh City. Two structural models were specified to assess the structural relationships between the constructs. The results show that student engagement is a meta-construct, a higher-order construct with three factors: cognitive, affective, and behavioral. Agentic engagement was added to the behavioral dimension. These factors can be measured at two levels: individual and context levels. In this study, the behavioral dimension of student engagement is a second-order concept, including academic, agentic, peer engagement, social engagement with instructors, and beyond-class engagement, combining behavioral engagement at the individual level (academic learning and agentic engagement) and the contextual level (engagement with peers, with instructors, and beyond-class engagement). The results show that student satisfaction with the learning environment positively affects student engagement, and there is a moderate correlation between engagement and learning outcomes. The lack of teaching quality (instruction) contributing to student engagement, the exclusion of online engagement, and the negative link between student-faculty engagement are questions that are worth further investigation.