Patterns of Momentary Engagement in Science

• In Event: 61.015 - Embracing and Modeling the Complex Dynamics of Motivation and Engagement: Contextual, Temporal, Dynamic, and Systematic

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Framework
Recent research has followed conceptions of Flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) to define students’ momentary engagement as combining high situational interest, skills, and challenge (Schneider et al., 2016). These momentary experiences are associated with learning and positive academic emotions (Schneider et al., 2016). However, less is known about the patterns of momentary engagement that students may experience. Investigating students’ momentary engagement might be especially important in science related fields, where students’ interest has been found to continuously decrease (Osborne & Dillon, 2008). In the present study, we examined the patterns of students’ momentary engagement, also comparing them in regular and in intervention physics 9th grade class. In addition, we investigated the hypothesis that momentary engagement may be related to students’ momentary task values (e.g., intrinsic, attainment, utility) and expectancies for success (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000) through examining the associations between these situational task values and expectancies with different patterns of engagement.

Methods and Analysis
Seventy-seven 9th-grade students (15% female) from two schools (one physics classroom from each school) in Santiago, Chile received smartphones pre-programmed with Experience Sampling Method (ESM) technology for a period of 8 weeks during the spring term 2017. Students were signaled during physics classes and responded to items assessing situational interest, skills, challenge, attainment and utility values, and expectancies on a 4-point scale (1=not at all; 4=very much). On average, it took 150 seconds to complete the items. Data included N = 475 beeps, with 54% occurring during classes in which an intervention designed to improve students’ learning and engagement in science was implemented.
Patterns of situational skills, interest, and challenge in science classes were analyzed using latent profile analysis (LPA; Muthén & Muthén, 1998-2018). The patterns were estimated separately for moments during and outside of the phenomenal intervention using the multiple group (e.g., knownclass) option with LPA. Then, the manual 3-step procedure using Mplus was conducted to estimate the relations of value and expectancies with the patterns.

Results
The analysis pointed to three engagement patterns: (1) ‘high skills and challenge’ (HSC; 57% of moments); (2) ‘low interest, skills, and challenge’ (LISC; 28% of moments); and (3) ‘high interest and skills’ (HIS; 15% of moments). Also, moments during the intervention involved higher and lower experiences of challenge in the HIS pattern and the HSC patterns respectively (see Figures 1 and 2), while the LISC pattern was not different. In addition, high situational task value and expectancies were positively associated with HSC and HIS experiences compared to LISC experiences with stronger associations during regular science classes relative to intervention classes.

Scientific Significance of the Study
The findings emphasize the importance of collecting data and analyzing students’ engagement at the unit-of-analysis of the learning moment. They also highlight the potential of LPA with complex options to identify diverse patterns of such engagements, and how these change in the context of an intervention. Specifically, the findings point to the interdependence role of students’ momentary task values and expectancies in their situated engagement in science.

Authors

• Katariina Salmela-Aro, Cicero Learning, University of Helsinki

• Patricio Cumsille