The Development of a Scale to Assess Student Arts Engagement in Low-Income Urban Schools

• In Event: 29.054 - Exploring Equity and Access for Priority Populations: Learning From Students, Teachers, and Arts Partnerships

Abstract

Objectives
Student engagement and arts education are both noted as strong predictors of student learning (Smithrim & Upitis, 2005), yet there remains a need for a valid and reliable instrument that can capture different dimensions of behavioral and cognitive student engagement in arts learning. This paper describes the development of an engagement scale that focuses on learning through the arts in 4th and 5th grade students in low-income urban schools. The paper seeks to answer the question, how can we construct and validate an instrument to assess student engagement in arts education?

Theoretical Framework
Student engagement is grounded in research on behavioral engagement and cognitive engagement (Appleton et al., 2008; Fredericks et al., 2004). Behavioral engagement draws on the traditional idea of student participation and refers to student involvement in academic, social or extracurricular activities. Cognitive engagement refers to students’ investments in the process of various academic tasks such as thinking, reasoning, and comprehension. These engagement dimensions are relevant for student arts learning (Smithrim, & Upitis, 2005), and thus serve as the conceptual basis for this instrument design.

Methods
Data for this study come from a multi-year study that aims to examine the effect of artist residencies on student achievement outcomes. Low-income urban students in 4th and 5th grades provided survey data in Spring 2016. Data analysis consisted of frequency and central tendency analyses to assess a descriptive summary of data. An exploratory factor analysis with varimax rotation was conducted to assess construct validity. Further, Cronbach alpha established the internal consistency of the scale.

Data Sources
Students completed a 20-item scale, Engaging in My Learning, adapted from Effective Teaching & Student Engagement Survey CAPE Veteran Partnerships (Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education, 2016). Participants included 729 students (52.8% girls and 47.2% boys) in 12 low-income urban schools. The sample consisted of 49.0% 4th grade students and 51.0% 5th grade students.

Results
Factor analysis with two factor extraction using varimax rotation identified 16 items that demonstrated good internal consistency as determined through Cronbach’s alpha of 0.80. The scree plot supported a two-component engagement scale, which can be mapped on to behavioral engagement dimension and cognitive engagement dimension. Together, the two components explained 30.65% of variance. Each component comprised of 8 items. Both components demonstrated good internal consistencies as observed through Cronbach’s alphas of 0.71 for behavioral engagement and cognitive engagement.

Significance
Research consistently emphasizes the importance of arts education and arts integration to increase student engagement, especially for low-income urban students. This instrument development study may help teachers and researchers understand how to conceptualize and examine the behavioral and cognitive dimensions of student engagement in a valid and reliable way. This instrument contributes to the education literature by offering a scale that may be used in future research on arts education that focuses on student engagement among low-income urban students.

Authors

• Bina Ali, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

• Annie Begle, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts