Student Interest and Engagement in the Classroom: Relationships with Student Personality and Developmental Variables

Abstract

Student interest and student engagement have been found to be important communication-related traits linked to student classroom outcomes, including student learning and student retention. Employing student identity development as well as personality constructs, this interdisciplinary study takes a student trait approach to better understand how best to foster both student interest and engagement in the classroom. Degree of identity exploration was found to be a positive predictor of student cognitive interest in course content. The personality construct need for cognition was found to be a positive predictor for both student interest and student engagement with course content. Implications for future research, including scale development, are discussed.