The application of sequential analyses allowed us to show that interactive sequences may account for a variety of meanings, thus making a significant contribution to the literature and research practice in classroom discourse.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between basic psychological needs and student engagement in a population of Italian secondary school students. To measure the psychological needs, we have selected a set of indicators that, beyond the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, also include the need for justice, which is crucial in adolescence when the degree of sensitivity to the ways people behave in interpersonal interactions is well developed. To measure student engagement, we have considered the four-dimensional structure of the construct, which has added the factor of agentic engagement to the three conventional dimensions of emotional, behavioural and cognitive engagement. Participants were 640 secondary school Italian students aged 15-17. The results confirm that justice should be considered as an additional basic need in school settings, as it fosters intrinsic student motivation and engagement. Moreover, our findings provide evidence that agency is a dimension that enriches the construct of student engagement. In the conclusion, justice and agency are treated as constructs that deserve to be more deeply considered in future research into learning environments.

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Notwithstanding the large consensus on the idea that justice should be favoured in school contexts to promote student well-being, there is still a lack of research that has investigated how the experience of justice at school spreads impact on global adolescent psychological health. The aim of this study is to investigate the degree to which the experience of teacher (in)justice is possibly related to some of the indicators of adolescent global psychological health, namely individual and social functioning, psychological problems, and somatic symptoms. We also test the role of two components of school-specific well-being, i.e., emotional engagement and classroom connectedness, here considered as potential mediators between teacher justice and psychological health. Structural equation modelling indicated that teacher justice is positively associated with emotional engagement, classroom connectedness and individual functioning, and negatively related to psychological problems. The relation from teacher justice to individual functioning was partially mediated by emotional engagement and classroom

The elusive character of student agency makes it a relevant construct to be investigated and measured. An initial effort in this direction was represented by the Agentic Engagement Scale, a five-item instrument designed to assess the degree to which students constructively contribute to the flow of the instructions they receive from the teacher. Despite its merits, in its current form this scale takes into account only a part of the wide range of student agentic expressions. In the present work, we propose an extension of the Agentic Engagement Scale from five to 10 items. Compared to the original scale, the new version covers a larger variety of proactive student contributions, such as those concerning peer interactions and those communications in which learners question or challenge the teacher's instructions. The study was conducted on 1,064 Italian high school students equally distributed between males and females. Confirmative factor analysis endorsed the adequacy of a one-factor structure of the enlarged Agentic Engagement Scale, which showed good psychometric properties as well as positive associations with student motivation to learn and the other three aspects of engagement (i.e., affective, behavioral, and cognitive). The theoretical and practical implications of a more comprehensive scale of student agentic engagement are discussed.