Background: The population of foreigners and the number of children enrolled in foreign schools are increasing, and health support for children at foreign schools is an urgent issue. Knowing the process of health support carried out by teaching staff at Brazilian school who have been educating children for many years will be a clue to solving the health problems faced by children at foreign schools.

Objective: To clarify the process of health support for children carried out by teaching staff at a Brazilian school who have been involved in the education of children in Japan for many years.

Methods: In May 2022, we conducted an interview survey with eight teaching staff who support children at a Brazilian school. A modified Grounded Theory Approach was used for the analysis. The analysis theme was “Processes of health support for children carried out by teaching staff at Brazilian schools”.

Results: The teaching staff felt confused about the differences between Brazilian and Japanese school cultures, and they also experienced an awareness of children's health issues by spending time together at school. Although they faced difficulties in understanding the characteristics and backgrounds of children and working with them, they were able to face the children and parents with the Brazilian nature of protecting children and the sense of mission of teaching staff to support their growth. They used Brazilian traditions and Japanese systems to support parents and children. Furthermore, the relationship of trust between teaching staff and children was deepened, and health support was continued based on the idea that the school was a family, at the pace of each child and parent.

Conclusion: It is suggested that it is necessary to take advantage of the characteristics of health support that treats the school as a family, which has been practiced by teaching staff at Brazilian schools, and to create a system to support the practice of health support provided by them.

Background: School engagement (SE) is a concept that refers to a motivated and active approach to school life, and is particularly important in elementary schools, where children lay the foundation for their development. However, there are few studies on SE scale development for elementary school students.

Objective: This study was conducted to create a SE scale for elementary school students and then to verify its validity and reliability.

Methods: Based on earlier research and interviews with elementary school teachers, we established an operational definition and a conceptual framework, and created items to elucidate the SE concept for elementary school students. The questionnaire including SE items was administered to 681 students from third to sixth grade in two elementary schools affiliated with a national university. Using data from 577 valid responses, a celling effect was observed in ９ of the 15 items of the SE scale, so we selected the categorical factor analysis to identify the factor structure through exploratory factor analysis, and then examined construct validity through confirmatory factor analysis. Criterion-related validity was assessed by examining the correlations between SE subscales and health and safety behavior scores. Reliability was confirmed using Cronbach's alpha coefficient.

Results: Results of exploratory factor analysis with categorical data show that the SE scale for elementary school students has a three-factor structure that was found to be roughly in line with the expected conceptual framework, with the following categories: “Behavioral School Engagement (Behavioral SE)”, “Affective School Engagement (Affective SE)” and “Cognitive School Engagement (Cognitive SE)”. Confirmatory factor analysis was performed based on that factor structure, and the model fit indices were CFI=0.96 and RMSEA=0.069, indicating that the fit between the data and the model was good. The reliability of the subscales was good, with alpha coefficients ranging from 0.71 to 0.92. Furthermore, moderate correlations were confirmed between the SE subscales and health and safety behavior score, indicating that the SE scale also has good criterion validity.

Conclusion: The SE scale developed in this study generally showed good validity and reliability in terms of content validity, construct validity, criterion-related validity, and reliability. However, there were issues and limitations, such as the need to devise the question items and options, and the target population was limited. In the future, it will be necessary to improve the scale items and options, conduct surveys at public elementary schools, and examine the generalizability of the scale and its relationship with other concepts.