Cross-Cultural Adaptation and Validation of STEM Student Engagement Scale in Amharic for Ethiopian University Students.

Abstract Student engagement in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education is among the essential elements in assessing students’ academic performance and quality of education in general in higher education’s institutes. It became very paramount to understand STEM students’ engagement which is important driver for addressing the challenges related to quality, equity, and pertinence in STEM education; therefore, having an effective and reliable instrument to measure student engagement in STEM is essential. This study aimed to structurally validate and check the cross-cultural robustness of the STEM Student Engagement Scale. In order to achieve this, a self-report questionnaire composed of the most pertinent conceptual elements and a previously existing instrument was used with 454 under graduate graduating class STEM students from two of Ethiopia's pioneering public universities, Hawassa University and Addis Ababa Science and Technology University. In addition to computing the global internal consistency, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed. Identical factor structures were found across all of the subsamples. The findings advance current research by offering a tool that allows for the measurement of multifaceted STEM students' engagement in the context of Ethiopian universities in Amharic. This scale contains psychometric properties and will be applied in research practice in the context.