Abstract
According to ecological system theory, both the microsystem environment (home environment) and the more macrolevel environment (provincial environment) influence school engagement in adolescents. This study tests an ecological model of adolescents’ school engagement with 19,084 middle school students across 31 provincial-level regions in China. Multilevel modeling is used to predict adolescents’ school engagement (behavior, emotion, and cognition) at two levels, individual [gender and family socioeconomic status (SES)] and provincial (economy, public cultural facilities, technological industry and education). The school engagement of students varies significantly across provincial-level regions. SES positively affects the school engagement of students. Students benefit from the provincial environment when the economy is booming, public cultural facilities are adequate and education is flourishing. The development of the technology industry fails to boost students’ school engagement. Limitations and future directions are discussed.
Highlights
School engagement, which is a way to predict academic performance and student boredom, has become an increasingly important concept for education researchers (Wang and Fredricks, 2014). Fredricks et al (2004) define school engagement in three ways
The model was built by adding gender and socioeconomic status (SES) as adolescent-level predictors and GDP per capita (GDPpc), public library books per capita (PBpc), population who had received higher education (PHE), educational appropriations per student (EAps), student-teacher ratio (STR), and TMTApc as province-level predictors
We specified a null parameter that is used to calculate the intraclass correlation (ICC), which estimates how much variation in school engagement exists between level-2 units
Summary
School engagement, which is a way to predict academic performance and student boredom, has become an increasingly important concept for education researchers (Wang and Fredricks, 2014). Fredricks et al (2004) define school engagement in three ways. The bidirectional interactions between adolescents and the microsystem context directly influence adolescents’ development (Kim, 2015). Prior studies have examined individual factors (age) and microsystem factors (home environment, family environment, parenting, neighborhood context, teacher quality, and school context) that predict students’ school engagement (Chiu et al, 2012; Lam et al, 2012; Wang and Eccles, 2012a; Shi et al, 2013; Wang and Chang, 2018; Harris et al, 2020). Few studies have provided robust proof of the interaction of microsystems and macrosystems and how the interaction influences adolescents’ school engagement. The bidirectional interactions between adolescents and the microsystem context directly influence adolescents’ development. This study obtained the school engagement scores and family SES of middle school students from 31 provincial regions in China and collected the economic, public cultural service, scientific and technological development and education indicators of the 31 provincial-level regions.
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