Abstract: Student engagement in physical education serves as both an effective indicator for predicting student learning outcomes and a significant means of improving physical education teaching practices. From an international perspective, this study employed a systematic literature review method to analyze 47 articles selected from five databases, including Web of Science, etc. The findings revealed that: ① International research primarily focuses on secondary school students through large-sample cross-sectional designs; ② No consensus has been reached on the conceptual framework and dimensional indicators of student engagement in physical education; ③ Studies predominantly rely on self-report methods to measure student engagement in physical education, while multimodal data-based assessment represents an important future direction; ④ The research emphasizes the intrinsic relationships between factors such as teachers, individuals, and student engagement; ⑤ The research themes predominantly concentrate on influencing factors analysis, with theoretical construction and tool development lagging behind. Therefore, it is proposed that scholars in China should focus on the reconstruction of the conceptual framework, accelerate the development of assessment tools, examine multiple influencing factors (e.g., teacher, family and technology), strengthen the innovation in empirical research methods and actively expand research themes, so as to promote the in-depth development of research on student engagement in physical education in China.