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Abstract
Person-centered studies identify profiles or groups of students with similar characteristics and typically examine the extent to which these profiles are associated with current functioning and/or predict students’ future academic outcomes (e.g., Fredricks et al., 2019; Johnson et al., 2022). Studies have used various operationalizations of student engagement (e.g., cognitive and affective; behavioral and cognitive) but typically find five to six distinct profiles. The current study seeks to expand this research with a population of middle school students to determine the number of profiles and whether these profiles are related to demographic characteristics and demographic performance. Participants were 1,038 sixth through the eighth-grade students from a rural school district in the Southeastern United States and data were collected via self-report with the Student Engagement Instrument (SEI; Appleton et al., 2006). Results indicated that a six-profile model best fit the data. The six profiles illustrated different levels of student engagement, with profiles ranging from highly engaged to highly disengaged. Analyses revealed that profiles were differentiated by demographic characteristics and other indicators of academic and behavioral functioning.