What is Student Engagement?

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When seeking to evaluate our teaching practice, one metric we may choose to use is student engagement - how immersed did students appear to be in the session? A quick (but potentially problematic) sense check of this might be the volume in the room for a group task.


However, is engagement the panacea it is heralded as and if so how can we create learning experiences that facilitate the engagement we seek from our learners?


In his discussion of student engagement, Groccia (2018) provides a detailed summary of literature supporting the benefit of engagement on student outcomes and performance, however perhaps more importantly outlines a multidimensional definition of engagement, that help us to not only understand what engagement is but as a result, to recognise what steps we may take to promote it.


This multidimensional model of engagement suggest that to be fully engaged students need to engage in three domains:


  • Behavioural (doing) - a learner needs to participate and complete the physical tasks asked of them, such that they display effort and persistence in the tasks and activities set.


  • Affective (feeling) - a learner needs to have a level of interest and motivation, such that they experience enjoyment and establish a level of commitment to the learning.


  • Cognitive (thinking) - a learner needs to employ their mental abilities to think about the concepts, challenges and questions that a learning experience is presenting to them, and draw upon past experiences to create new understanding.


When engagement is thought of in this multidimensional way, it can allow us to reflect on a  common assumption that active students who are making the right noises in a session (doing and feeling), may not be fully engaged cognitively in the thought processes we desire (thinking), and as a result potentially not on track to experience the learning outcomes targeted. 


So what can we do about it, and how can we use this insight to optimise our practice?


One thing to consider and will help to reduce any stress we put ourselves under is to recognise that engagement is not all or nothing. Students' engagement will inevitably fluctuate throughout a session, a programme and across time. We therefore don’t need to beat ourselves up if all students aren’t fully engaged in a session.


We then need to think about how we can address each domain of the model - doing, feeling, thinking. These can be addressed in a myriad of ways, however some initial ideas could be:


  • Doing - have we set up the learning experience or task such that learners can do what we want them to, is it explained appropriately, are all resources available and are students able to do what we ask of them, for instance is it a practical task that is far beyond their current competence level?


  • Feeling - feeling of enjoyment can come from achievement and social connection. Can we provide learning experiences that include opportunities for regular feedback and measurement of progress such as using formal and informal formative assessment, and can we plan activities that require interaction and collaboration, building social connections between students, such that positive feelings are experienced?


  • Thinking - facilitating students’ appropriate cognitive engagement with a topic, will depend upon the subject itself, the strategies we adopt, and our own teaching philosophy such that we may value for instance direct instruction or discovery learning approaches. However if we are clear on the outcome we desire, articulate these through action oriented learning objectives that align to blooms taxonomy (e.g. to remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create), and then create learning experiences that require students to cognitively engage in these actions, then we can help to facilitate this domain of engagement.


Student engagement, if not the panacea we desire, plays a significant role in student outcomes and performance, and therefore having a clear understanding of what it entails, can clearly allow us to be more effective in facilitating it and the student learning and development we desire.



References:


Groccia, J. E. (2018). What is Student Engagement? New Directions for Teaching and Learning. (154). pp. 11-20. 

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