Cognitive engagement has traditionally been operationalized by measuring the extent of students’ homework completion, class attendance, extra-curricular participation in activities, or their general interactions with the teachers, and how motivated they seem while engaging in classroom discussions (Appleton et al. 2006). This description of cognitive engagement suggests that it is considered by most authors a more or less stable trait of students, independent of the context. We suggest that cognitive engagement is more or less dependent on the task at hand because the task determines the extent of students’ autonomy.