Working Hard or Hardly Working: Sources of Legitimation for High School Students' Academic Engagement

Academic engagement is a precursor to student achievement, and thus exploring its potential antecedents informs studies of adolescent development. We employ a theory from structural social psychology, the theory of the legitimacy of authority, to craft measures of possible sources of legitimation-authorization, endorsement, and propriety-for student engagement. We examine the effects of these measures on three aspects of academic engagement: disciplinary conformity, effort during class, and out-of-school homework, which represent compliance to norms for appropriate school-related behaviors. With a subsample from the 10th grade first-year follow-up survey of NELS:88 (N = 3,868), we complete maximum likelihood factor analyses and weighted regressions with lagged dependent variables. We find that sources of legitimation positively predict levels of academic engagement and compete favorably with perceptions of parental aspirations for future educational achievement as predictors. We argue that sources of legitimation should also be incorporated into tests of theories regarding reproduction of social inequalities.