The ideology of student engagement research

In a series of recent papers, Nick Zepke has criticised those researching student engagement in higher education for uncritically supporting neoliberalism. The current highly politicised nature of higher education means that clarity about the political implications of engagement research is crucial. This conceptual paper argues that in focusing on literature on students’ engagement in learning, Zepke overlooks another substantial body of engagement literature, on students’ participation in decisions about learning and teaching. By exploring the political alignment of two of the key models used to conceptualise students’ engagement in decision-making, the paper argues that a central element of the research into student engagement is in fact directly opposed to neoliberal approaches to higher education. Student engagement has been deployed both for and against neoliberalism. Zepke has argued that the research on engagement sides with neoliberalism; I show that the research that focuses on student engagement in decision-making supports the opposition.     

Evaluation of a pedagogical model for student engagement in learning activities

Current research suggests that student engagement with academic schoolwork in secondary school classrooms is often insufficient. This issue is of relevance because student engagement is a prerequisite for acquiring knowledge and skills and is also a mediator of achievement and important life outcomes. In response to this, the present study evaluates a pedagogical model for stimulating student engagement in learning activities in secondary school contexts through an action research approach. This model is composed of five facilitators of engagement that, when considered in both the design and implementation of learning activities, can potentially contribute to stimulating behavioural, emotional and cognitive engagement in such activities. Nineteen Year 9 students of Spanish from a state school in England, their teacher and the researcher participated in two long-term, learning activities designed using the proposed pedagogical model. Data were collected over two school terms through qualitative student self-reports, interviews with students and their teacher and the researcher’s journal. Thematic analyses were used to examine the effects of the learning activities on student behavioural, emotional and cognitive engagement. The results seem to confirm that the application of the proposed pedagogical model could help promote thorough student engagement in learning activities. Findings also suggest that failing to support the model’s facilitators of engagement may have detrimental effects on overall student engagement in learning activities. The study contributes to the improvement of student engagement with academic schoolwork internationally by proposing an assessed pedagogical solution that could be implemented by secondary school teachers with relative ease.     

Leadership practices for student engagement in challenging conditions

Student Engagement is the investment of time, effort and other relevant resources by both students and their institutions intended to optimise the student experience and enhance the learning outcomes and development of students, and the performance and reputation of the institution. As such, it has affective, behavioural and cognitive dimensions, which may manifest congruently or oppositionally. The current popularity of the concept derives from a large body of evidence suggesting that student engagement improves a range of desirable outcomes. A study funded by the Leadership Foundation to uncover leadership practices that enhanced student engagement revealed the importance of climate, resourcing, communication and values. The article concludes with some suggestions of how the findings might usefully be applied in a higher education setting.     

Student engagement in the educational interface: understanding the mechanisms of student success

Student success and retention continue to be of concern for higher education institutions. Wider participation, combined with lower completion rates for non-traditional students, highlights the need for new ways of understanding the student experience to ground policy and practice. This article provides this insight by drawing together a number of key constructs to refine a recent framework of student engagement. We argue that the transition metaphor, focusing on the first year, is limited because it depicts differences between students and institutions as both transient and temporal. Instead, we use a cultural lens to introduce the educational interface as a metaphor for the individual psychosocial space within which institutional and student factors combine and student engagement in learning occurs. Incorporating the interface into the existing framework of student engagement makes three contributions to our understanding of the student experience. First, the educational interface is a tangible way of representing the complex interactions between students and institutions, and how those interactions influence engagement. Second, the refined framework highlights four specific psychosocial constructs: self-efficacy, emotions, belonging and well-being, which, we contend, are critical mechanisms for mediating the interactions between student and institutional characteristics and student engagement and success. Finally, the refined framework helps to explain why some students with demographic characteristics associated with lower completion rates are retained and do go on to successfully complete their studies, while similar others do not. These three contributions, the interface, the key constructs within it being mediating mechanisms and their explanatory utility, provide focus for the design and implementation of curricula and co-curricular initiatives aimed at enhancing student success and retention, and importantly to evaluate the impact of these interventions.     

A conceptual framework for analysing the impact of influences on student engagement and learning

The notion that ‘customer satisfaction’ should be the ultimate measure of quality provision of any service organization is often accepted in the higher education context. However, measuring the quality of an educational institution based on students’ satisfaction is insufficient as it diverts the focus from student development, advancement and growth to an affective evaluation of the service. More appropriate measures of quality of higher education institutions are student engagement and learning. This study describes the likely impact of perceived overall quality of higher education institutions on student engagement. The contribution of this study is twofold. First, it draws attention to the importance of higher education institution quality as the main institutional-level determinant of student engagement and, second, it suggests a comprehensive multilevel conceptual framework for its empirical testing.     

The development and validation of the student engagement scale in an Ethiopian university context

This paper is positioned to make a sound contribution to knowledge of higher education (HE) quality through its study of student engagement in a large university in Ethiopia. We establish that the assessment of student engagement is a valid facet in determining HE quality, contributing holistically alongside quality assurance and university rankings. The authors present an example of this through reporting on a statistical analysis of an adjustment of the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement survey and its administration in the Ethiopian university. The results of factor analysis illustrate empirical support for the nine-factor engagement scale and a number of associated factors related to student demographics and university experience. The results of the multi-validation approach provide specific guidelines to universities using this approach to evaluate the validity and reliability of this construct. The paper provides a supporting tool that can be used by other universities to assist in the evaluation of students’ engagement with their undergraduate programmes.     

Enhancing student engagement in pre-vocational and vocational education: a learning history

Interest in student engagement has increased over the past decade, which has resulted in increased knowledge about this concept and about the aspects that facilitate engagement. However, as yet, only a few studies have focused on engagement from the perspective of the teacher. In this study, we capture the experiences of teachers who were explicitly working with their teams on fostering student engagement. We used the learning history method to capture those experiences and at the same time to stimulate learning within the participating teams. A learning history includes the voices of the different participants involved in order to stimulate reflection and learning. Three teams of teachers participated in the writing of this learning history. Several teachers (n = 10), students (n = 10), and managers (n = 5) from or related to the teams were interviewed. The learning history shows that, on the one hand, teachers emphasized positive relationships and structure in relation to student engagement, yet, on the other hand, students continued to provide examples of negative relationships and mentioned a lack of structure, although they also mentioned improvements. Furthermore, the learning history showed that teachers in all teams reflected on their experiences and learned from the activities employed to foster student engagement, which included taking a more positive approach, conversations about a skills form, and being more consequent. These results taken together indicate that it is possible for teachers to do a better job of engaging their students and that their repertoire can be expanded to include more engagement-related actions. Finally, the learning history produced offers insight into the difficulties experienced by the teams. An important limitation mentioned by all teams was that teachers found it difficult to address each other’s behavior when someone did not act as agreed upon.     

Relations between academic performance,student engagement and student burnout: A cross-lagged analysis of a two-wave study

Academic performance and student well-being are two desired outcomes of any learning and instruction process. The purpose of the present study was to test the temporal order of the relationships between academic performance and two forms of student well-being (i.e., student engagement and burnout) in a specific context. 142 psychology undergraduate students completed self-reported measures of student engagement and student burnout in two waves, during a semester. Also, we included their grades from two intermediate evaluations. Path analysis models suggested that academic grades could be considered antecedents of student engagement and student burnout, while the well-being measures cannot be considered antecedents of the academic performance. These findings provide additional knowledge regarding the relationships between academic well-being and academic performance.     

Online student perceptions of engagement,transactional distance,and outcomes

This study explores student perceptions of engagement, transactional distance, and outcomes in online courses. Researchers also investigated linkages between these elements. Data were collected from students enrolled in online courses at three private universities located at different geographical regions in the United States. Six hundred sixty-seven students completed the Revised Scale of Transactional Distance developed by Paul, Swart, Zhang, and MacLeod and a modified version of Dixson’s Online Student Engagement scale during spring 2016 semester. Results indicate students experienced a relatively high level of engagement and a moderate level of transactional distance. Respondents perceived outcomes such as satisfaction, progression, and learning very positively. There were significant differences in responses based on gender and college standing. Student engagement, transactional distance, and outcomes were moderately correlated, and researchers confirmed transactional distance is a valid predictor of student engagement.     

Navigating the ambiguous policy landscape of student participation

ABSTRACT

Student participation at school is receiving heightened attention through international evidence connecting it to a range of benefits including student learning, engagement, citizenship and wellbeing, as well as to overall school improvement. Yet the notion of student participation remains an ambiguous concept, and one that challenges many deeply entrenched norms of traditional schooling.

Informed by understandings of ‘participation’ linked to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, this article takes the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) as a case study to explore how student participation is currently articulated in educational policy. It reports the findings of an analysis of 142 state and federal government policy-related documents, along with qualitative interview data from nine policy personnel. The findings suggest that students are conceptualised within these policies in contradictory ways, interpretations of participation are diverse yet frequently instrumentalist, and there is little conceptual coherence across the educational policy landscape in NSW in relation to ‘student participation’. The findings are discussed in light of international interest around student participation. The analytical framework used in this analysis is proposed as a possible tool for critically examining the place and purpose of student participation at school, regardless of jurisdiction.

Abbrevations: NSW = the Australian state of New South Wales; UNCRC = United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child; SRC = Student Representative Council     

Increasing student engagement and reducing exhaustion through the provision of demanding but well-resourced training

Despite the fact that both workplace and training environments can be inherently demanding, these environments sometimes manage to elicit a level of engagement and enthusiasm that is surprising. The Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model has been used extensively within the workplace to predict both engagement and burnout. It suggests that high demands lead to burnout, but that appropriately targeted resources mitigate the impact of these demands, and increase engagement. In order to test this model within the university context a survey was developed to assess participants of a short academic skills training programme. The survey measured students’ perception of demands, resources, engagement and burnout immediately following the programme. Evidence suggests that resources were positively related to engagement, and that demands had a positive relationship with exhaustion, but not the other components of burnout. The relationship between the actual demands of the training and exhaustion was mediated by the individual’s emotional or stress related experience of that demand. This research suggests that the JD-R model has value in predicting both engagement and exhaustion for participants in short training programmes.     

An action research study into the role of student negotiation in enhancing perceived student engagement during English speaking classes at university level in Turkey

A major issue in English language teaching in Turkey and other monolingual countries is the teaching of spoken English. This article reports the initial and final stages of an action research study which used student negotiation to enhance student engagement in speaking classes. The research was conducted in the English Language Teaching Department of a university in Turkey and involved the provision of student-negotiated speaking classes for one term during which qualitative and quantitative data collected from students through questionnaires on a weekly basis informed the design of the speaking activities. The results of content analysis and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests showed that student negotiation promoted student engagement through providing speaking classes appropriate to students’ needs and interests, which resulted in more positive perceived speaking ability and greater willingness to communicate. This study demonstrates the significance of student negotiation in speaking classes and has implications for enhancing student engagement in speaking classroom activities.     

Conceptualising student voice in UK higher education: four theoretical lenses

The ‘student voice’ is highly profiled in UK higher education, yet highly under-theorised. Over the past 20 years UK universities have gone from a taxpayer-funded, free at the point of use model, to one supported through tuition fees via Government-backed loans. Subsequently, there is a growth of discourse about universities as businesses and students as paying customers/consumers whose opinions and demands must be considered. This article outlines four possible theoretical lenses (or frameworks) through which student voice can be analysed, enabling an exploration of the vested interests and power relations entailed. These lenses draw on (1) research on student voice and power in compulsory education; (2) regulatory capture from Economics; (3) the notion of students voice as part of an incomplete whole and (4) non-representational theory, developed in Human Geography by Nigel Thrift.     

Student perspectives of engagement in learning in contemporary and digital contexts

ABSTRACT

Increasing significance has been ascribed to student engagement, as a measure of success of both teachers and programs. However, since users of the term commonly tend not to explain, rationalise or problematise their understanding of engagement, its value to understand or transform learning may be limited. While clarification has occurred in conceptual work, there is a lack of empirical work that extends beyond understandings of engagement-as-behaviour, as well as insufficient work exploring what students understand engagement to be. Further, much work on engagement is rooted in physical campuses and face-to-face delivery, which represents an incomplete picture of how students actually engage in study. This article investigates student perceptions of engagement in two blended learning Initial Teacher Education programs. It offers a critical discussion of how research can be re-considered in light of changing learning contexts and changing understandings of ways to investigate engagement. The findings of this study support previous work that found multiple levels and meanings of student engagement exist. New complex and multidimensional models of engagement are proposed, which can open new possibilities for designing studies and analysing findings. This article argues that including and questioning physical, virtual and political contexts and power, affect, relationships, linearity and essential measurability are important features of new models of engagement.     

Adaptability,engagement and academic achievement at university

University entry is a time of great change for students. The extent to which students are able to effectively navigate such change likely has an impact on their success in university. In the current study, we examined this by way of adaptability, the extent to which students’ adaptability is associated with their behavioural engagement at university, and the extent to which both are associated with subsequent academic achievement. A conceptual model reflecting this pattern of predicted relations was developed and tested using structural equation modelling. First-year undergraduate students (N = 186) were surveyed for their adaptability and behavioural engagement at the beginning of their first year. Following this, students’ academic achievement was obtained from university records at the end of Semester 1 and 2 of first-year university. Findings showed that adaptability was associated with greater positive behavioural engagement (persistence, planning, and task management) and lower negative behavioural engagement (disengagement and self-handicapping). Moreover, negative behavioural engagement was found to inversely predict academic achievement in Semester 1, which predicted academic achievement in Semester 2. The educational implications of the findings are discussed.     

The professional student program for educational resilience: Enhancing momentary engagement in classwork

Abstract

The Professional Student Program for Educational Resilience (PROSPER) was designed to increase students’ ability to stay momentarily engaged in classwork, thus promoting educational resilience. Participants (N?=?277, 51% male, 74% Irish) from two low-income schools in Dublin, Ireland (School A n?=?158; School B n?=?119), were assessed using the intervention’s theory of change: (1) change in knowledge of how to stay engaged in classwork, (2) subsequent change in momentary engagement in classwork, and (3) subsequent longer-term change in dispositions for engagement (i.e., tendency to enjoy learning). Qualitative results demonstrated that PROSPER facilitated students’ knowledge, momentary engagement, and teachers’ involvement with students. Quantitative analyses uncovered changes in knowledge and momentary engagement for both the higher and lower ability tracks in School A. The results give refined information on how this universal-school based program increased students’ momentary engagement and supported their educational resilience.     

Measuring teaching quality and student engagement in South Korea and The Netherlands

Six observation scales for measuring the skills of teachers and 1 scale for measuring student engagement, assessed in South Korea and The Netherlands, are sufficiently reliable and offer sufficient predictive value for student engagement. A multigroup confirmatory factor analysis shows that the factor loadings and intercepts of the scales are the same, within acceptable boundaries, in both countries. Therefore, we can compare the average scores of teachers in both countries in a reliable and valid way. The 289 Dutch teachers score significantly better on “creating a safe and stimulating learning climate” and “intensive and activating teaching” and almost significantly on “efficient classroom management”. We find no significant differences in “clear and structured instruction”. The 375 South Korean teachers perform significantly better than the Dutch teachers on “teaching learning strategies” and almost significantly on “differentiating instruction”. Furthermore, we find better student engagement in South Korea.     

The effects of individual characteristics,socioeconomic status,and political engagement on the attainment of student leadership roles in Chinese university students

This study analyzes the effects of individual characteristics, socioeconomic status, and political engagement among Chinese university students with respect to their attainment of student leadership roles. The study investigated 10,930 students from elite Chinese universities. The results showed that female and only-child students were more likely to become student leaders than male students and students with siblings. Students from local Hukou (household registration) were less likely than students from nonlocal Hukou, to become student leaders. Each upgrade of one level in the membership of the Chinese Communist Party doubled the students’ odds for attaining student leadership roles.     

Exploring the relationship between homework task difficulty,student engagement and performance

This article considers the relationship between differential homework task difficulty, student engagement and performance across four Irish post-primary school sites. A total of 236 participants completed all elements of this study. All participants were junior cycle students, aged between 12 and 16 years. The study employed a standardised test–retest approach, with a one week interval between tests. Between testing, participants were randomly subdivided into three cohorts. Each cohort received homework questions of different difficulty levels to complete for one week. The results of this study found that Cohort A, who received the least difficult homework tasks, completed the most non-compulsory questions. Although Cohort A demonstrated higher levels of engagement, no statistically significant difference was found in the change in performance scores of the three cohorts. The results highlight the negative impact of increased task difficulty on student engagement with independent homework tasks. The findings suggest that in order to support student engagement it is important that teachers afford ample opportunity for student success when designing self-directed tasks such as homework.     

The meaning of student engagement and disengagement in the classroom context: lessons from organisational behaviour

Despite the popularity of student engagement and, by association, student disengagement, the academic literature is unclear about the meaning of these terms. This review extends existing conceptual studies of student engagement by offering clear definitions and conceptualisations of both student engagement and disengagement in the classroom context. To develop these conceptualisations, the present review draws upon organisational behaviour theory on work engagement and disengagement because the literature in this discipline is notably more refined than in educational research. Using an organisational behaviour backdrop, student engagement and disengagement are defined by the degree of students’ activation and pleasure. In order to operationalise student engagement, measures that are aligned with the proposed conceptualisation are recommended. Recommendations are also suggested for the development of a measure of student disengagement. The proposed measurement of student engagement and disengagement should provide a unified direction for future empirical research on these topics.