Measuring Students' Identification with School

This article describes the development of a student rating scale that assesses the degree to which students identify with or disidentify from school and whether there are gender or racial group differences in identification. The Identification with School Questionnaire was tested on a sample of 3,539 eighth-grade pupils. Confirmatory factor analyses of the data provided evidence that a unidimensional scale may better reflect the degree to which students identify with school than do separate measures of belonging and valuing. Analyses of variance of the scale indicated that female students exhibited higher degrees of identification with school than did their male peers, African American students were more identified with school than were White students, and White male youngsters had the lowest levels of identification with school.