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Internationally, educational stakeholders are concerned with the high levels of student disengagement, evidenced by early school leaving, poor student behaviour, and low levels of academic achievement. The solution, student engagement, is a contested concept, theorised in a variety of different ways within academic literature. To further understand this concept, a phenomenographic study was conducted to map secondary school teachers' conceptions of student engagement. Six qualitatively different ways of understanding student engagement were found. This research indicates that teachers do not hold similar understandings of what student engagement means. If the concept of engagement is to become educationally fruitful, the term must be more explicitly defined in educational research and government policy documents to promote shared understandings amongst stakeholder groups.

Formative assessment policies and self-regulation theories argue that student selfassessment of their own work and processes are useful for raising academic performance and self-regulatory skills. However, research into student self-evaluation raises serious doubts about the quality of self-assessment as an assessment process and identifies conditions which must be met if students' judgments are to be useful, valid, and reliable. This paper recommends that student self-assessment should no longer be treated as an assessment, but instead as an essential competence for self-regulation. As such, we describe a potential curriculum approach that could guide teachers to appropriate use of self-assessment tools.

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