Promising Strategies for Addressing the Challenge of Measuring Student Engagement

• In Event: Motivation and Learning: What Is Provocative and/or Novel?

Abstract

Student engagement is a multidimensional construct that includes behavioral, emotional, and cognitive dimensions and describes the quality of involvement in an activity or learning context. In this presentation, we outline the challenges with measuring engagement, and overview different approaches to address each of these challenges.

The first challenge is that engagement is assumed to be dynamic, fluctuating, and context dependent, but the majority of measures assess engagement in one context at one point in time. Methods that collect data in real time in the context of discrete learning activities, such as experience sampling techniques, daily diaries, log files, and physiological assessment (e.g. eye tracking, EEG, and galvanic skin techniques) are one way to address this challenge.

A second challenge is a lack of definitional and theoretical clarity guiding the decision of how to assess engagement. One powerful approach for addressing this concern and enhancing the validity of our measures is to use mixed methods. We conducted interviews with students and teachers about their conceptualization of engagement and compared their responses to the academic literature. One difference is that students and teachers frequently included social indicators, such as sharing and expanding on peers’ ideas, as indicative of engagement. We used this qualitative information to develop and validate a new self-report measure of math and science engagement that included behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and social dimensions.

A third challenge is how to study engagement at the classroom level without aggregating student self-report measures, which are susceptible to social desirability bias and don’t allow for heterogeneity within classrooms. Observational measures are one approach to address this challenge. We observed 33 middle school classrooms and coded the behavioral engagement level. Our results demonstrate a positive relation between behavioral engagement and mathematics achievement. We will suggest promising future directions for the measurement of engagement and implications for policy and practice.

Authors

• Jennifer A. Fredricks, Union College

• Tara Lynn Hofkens, University of Virginia

• Ming-Te Wang, University of Pittsburgh