All better than being disengaged: Student engagement patterns and their relations to academic self-concept and achievement

Katharina Schnitzler,Doris Holzberger,Tina Seidel

doi:10.1007/s10212-020-00500-6

Katharina Schnitzler, Doris Holzberger + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-020-00500-6

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Abstract

Student participation and cognitive and emotional engagement in learning activities play a key role in student academic achievement and are driven by student motivational characteristics such as academic self-concept. These relations have been well established with variable-centered analyses, but in this study, a person-centered analysis was applied to describe how the different aspects of student engagement are combined within individual students. Specifically, we investigated how the number of hand-raisings interacts with student cognitive and emotional engagement in various engagement patterns. Additionally, it was analyzed how these engagement patterns relate to academic self-concept as an antecedent and achievement as an outcome. In an empirical study, high school students (N = 397) from 20 eighth-grade classrooms were surveyed and videotaped during one mathematics school lesson. The design included a pre- and post-test, with the videotaping occurring in between. Five within-student engagement patterns were identified by latent profile analysis: disengaged, compliant, silent, engaged, and busy. Students with higher academic self-concept were more likely to show a pattern of moderate to high engagement. Compared with students with low engagement, students with higher engagement patterns gained systematically in end-of-year achievement. These findings illustrate the power of person-centered analyses to illuminate the complexity of student engagement. They imply the need for differentiation beyond disengaged and engaged students and bring along the recognition that being engaged can take on various forms, from compliant to busy.

Highlights

Whole-class dialogues are a predominant classroom activity in most educational systems (Seidel and Prenzel 2006; Stigler et al 1999), which provide students with important learning opportunities because during whole-class dialogues students and teachers jointly construct knowledge and establish a shared understanding (Mercer and Dawes 2014)
Student engagement in whole-class dialogues is complex as it comprises behavioral engagement in the form of active student participation, as well as further aspects of cognitive and emotional engagement (Fredricks et al 2004)
External student participation as the verbalization of one’s own ideas and answers is identified as a key function of student learning (Sedova et al 2019), which is associated with the assumption that silent students might miss learning opportunities (O’Connor et al 2017)

Summary

Introduction

Whole-class dialogues are a predominant classroom activity in most educational systems (Seidel and Prenzel 2006; Stigler et al 1999), which provide students with important learning opportunities because during whole-class dialogues students and teachers jointly construct knowledge and establish a shared understanding (Mercer and Dawes 2014). Student engagement in whole-class dialogues is complex as it comprises behavioral engagement in the form of active student participation, as well as further aspects of cognitive and emotional engagement (Fredricks et al 2004). These aspects occur to be separate dimensions from one another, they share substantial overlap leading to complex interdependencies (Wang et al 2019). Disentangling the specific effects of each engagement dimension on student achievement turns out to be a challenging endeavor. Students may think about how they would answer the teacher’s questions and compare their ideas with those of their peers, thereby integrating identified contractions and overt teacher feedback into their conceptual understanding (Mercer and Dawes 2014)

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