Low Academic Engagement Research Articles

A Behavioral Economic Analysis of Marijuana and Other Drug Use Among Heavy Drinking Young Adults.

Behavioral economic models predict that deficits in substance-free reward and future time orientation are associated with greater drug involvement, but this hypothesis has not been systematically investigated among young adult heavy drinkers. This study evaluated the association between drug use levels (heavy drinking (HD) only, HD + marijuana use, and HD + polysubstance use) and substance-free activity engagement, future orientation, and reward deprivation (comprised of reward experience and environmental suppressors of reward) among heavy drinkers. Participants were 358 college students who reported two or more past-month heavy drinking episodes (5/4 or more drinks in one occasion for a man/woman). The sample was 60% women, 79% Caucasian, and the average age was 18.76 (SD = 1.07) years. Participants completed measures of alcohol and drug use, weekly time allocation to various activities, future time orientation, and reward deprivation. Overall, any drug use was associated with less time spent engaged in academics and exercise, and lower future time orientation compared to HD only. Any drug use was associated with reward deprivation and HD + polysubstance use was associated with lower reward experience and environmental suppressors. Drug use among heavy drinkers is associated with lower academic engagement and exercise, future orientation, and reward deprivation. These results provide support for behavioral economic models of drug abuse and suggest that prevention approaches should attempt to increase future orientation and availability of drug-free reward.

Study engagement and burnout profiles among Finnish higher education students

A person-oriented approach was applied to identify profiles of study engagement and burnout (i.e., exhaustion, cynicism, inadequacy) in higher education in a large and representative sample of 12,394 higher education students at different phases of their studies in universities and polytechnics in Finland. Four profiles were identified: Engaged (44%), engaged-exhausted (30%) inefficacious (19%) and burned-out (7%). The engaged students had the most positive engagement accompanied with the least burnout symptoms compared to other groups. The engaged-exhausted students experienced emotional exhaustion simultaneously with academic engagement. The inefficacious group had heightened experience of inadequacy as a student. The burned-out students showed very high cynicism and inadequacy and very low academic engagement compared to the other groups. Of these groups, the engaged students tended to be in the earlier stages in their studies, whereas the burned-out and inefficacious students had been studying the longest. The pattern suggests that students starting out with high engagement and that burnout becomes more common later in the academic career. Supporting demands-resources model, the covariates reflecting the demands were higher and those reflecting resources were lower among the burned-out and inefficacious students compared to the engaged students.

Comparison of Academic Engagement, Academic Burnout, Stress, and Social Support by Grade among Undergraduate Nursing Students

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine and compare the academic engagement, academic burnout, stress, and social support among undergraduate nursing students by grade. Methods: The study is a descriptive comparative survey. The participants were 247 undergraduate nursing students enrolled in 3 universities located in G city. The collected data was analyzed with descriptive statistics, x2 tests, and analysis of covariance, using SPSS/WIN 21.0 program. Results: The students showed significant differences in academic engagement, academic burnout, and stress according to their grade. The post-hoc analysis results showed that sophomores and juniors had lower academic engagement and higher academic burnout and stress than others (i.e., freshmen, or seniors). There was no significant difference in social support among nursing students. Academic engagement had a positive correlation with social support and a negative correlation with academic burnout and stress. Also, academic burnout had a positive correlation with stress and a negative correlation with academic engagement and social support. Conclusion: The findings indicate that nursing students in second and third grade were at risk of academic burnout and under severe stress. Therefore, sophomores and juniors need more attention and care to help them relieve and control stress and burnout and to improve their academic engagement. Also, the findings should be considered when developing plans and/or interventions for nursing students’ major adjustment and academic achievement.

Truancy in the United States: Examining temporal trends and correlates by race, age, and gender

BackgroundTruancy has long been regarded a common problem in urgent need of effective intervention. Knowledge about factors associated with truancy can guide the development and implementation of interventions. MethodThis paper examined trends in truancy rates between 2002 and 2014 and correlates of truancy across racial/ethnic groups. Variables of interest included sociodemographic factors (e.g., age, gender, socio-economic background), behavioral factors (e.g., substance use, violence), and psychosocial factors (e.g., academic engagement, grades, parental control). Using data from a large sample of adolescents (n=209,393; 12–17years) we estimated truancy prevalence rates and examined trends and correlates via regression analyses. ResultsTruancy rates remained constant between 2002 (10.8%) and 2014 (11.1%). Rates were highest among older youth, females, and Hispanic youth. For all racial/ethnic groups, truancy was significantly correlated with alcohol and marijuana use, fighting, the propensity to take risks, and lower academic engagement and school grades. Other factors were differentially associated with racial/ethnic groups. This divergence in risk patterns for different racial/ethnic groups points to some heterogeneity among truant youth. DiscussionDespite truancy reduction efforts, truancy rates have remained stable. Efforts to prevent truancy and to intervene with truant youth may need to target risk factors more prevalent in specific racial/ethnic groups.

Evaluating the Impact of Increasing General Education Teachers’ Ratio of Positive-to-Negative Interactions on Students’ Classroom Behavior

The aim of this study was to isolate and evaluate the impact of increasing teachers’ ratios of positive-to-negative interactions with their students. Training teachers on the 5:1 ratio was evaluated using a randomized-block pre–post control design with general education classroom teachers ( N = 6) that were characterized by a higher ratio of negative-to-positive interactions between students, as well as low academic engagement and high disruptive behaviors. Teachers in the intervention group were trained on the 5:1 ratio, instructed to wear a device that prompted them on a VI 5-min schedule to deliver specific praise, approval statements, and positive non-verbal gestures to specific students exhibiting expected behaviors or the entire class as a whole, and completing a self-monitoring chart to increase their awareness of their ratios. Results revealed that students in the intervention group displayed significantly fewer disruptive behavior problems and higher academic engaged time when compared with students in control classrooms. Social validity results also revealed that teachers found the strategy feasible, acceptable, and effective. Limitations of this research, including the small-scale nature of this study, and future directions for teacher training, retention, and schoolwide universal prevention are discussed.

Boys Don’t Work? On the Psychological Benefits of Showing Low Effort in High School

Male students show less academic effort and lower academic achievement than do female students. The present study aimed to shed more light on the reasons for why male students show low academic effort despite the finding that this undermines their academic achievement. We explored whether students experience psychological benefits from showing low effort or “effortless” achievement in school and whether these benefits are greater for male than for female students. In two experimental vignette studies with independent samples of German ninth graders (N = 210) and teachers (N = 176), we systematically varied student targets’ gender, effort, and achievement and tested for effects on targets’ ascribed intelligence, popularity, likeability, masculinity, femininity, and gender-typicality. The “effortless” achiever was rated as more popular than students showing high effort. Teachers perceived the effortless achiever as the most intelligent target. Academic effort further increased students’ ratings of a low-achieving target’s likeability and students’ and teachers’ ratings of all targets’ femininity as well as decreased students’ ratings of all targets’ masculinity. Students and teachers perceived targets showing low (vs. high) effort as more similar to a typical boy, whereas teachers perceived targets showing high (vs. low) effort as more similar to a typical girl. Results indicate a need to understand the psychological benefits of low academic engagement, especially for male students, and to address the feminine stereotyping of (academic) effort.

Exposure to Violence in the Community Predicts Friendships with Academically Disengaged Peers During Middle Adolescence.

Adolescents who have been exposed to violence in the community often experience subsequent difficulties with academic achievement. Because competence in the classroom is a salient developmental task during the adolescent years, outcomes in this critical context can then have broader implications for social and psychological functioning. In the current study, we tested a hypothesized progression in which the association between violence exposure and deficient achievement is presumed to potentiate friendships with academically disengaged peers. We followed 415 urban adolescents (53% girls; average age of 14.6years) for a one-year period, with two annual assessment of psychosocial functioning. Exposure to violence in the community and academic engagement were assessed with a self-report inventory; reciprocated friendships were assessed with a peer interview; and achievement was indexed based on a review of school records. Consistent with our hypotheses, neighborhood violence was associated with deficient classroom achievement. Poor achievement, in turn, mediated associations between community violence exposure and low academic engagement among friends. Our findings highlight pathways though which exposure to community violence potentially predicts later dysfunction.

Contributors to academic failure in postsecondary education: A review and a Canadian context

Postsecondary enrollment has been rising globally over the past years, but poor performance and drop-out have also been increasing and have become an academic concern. Most drop-outs tend not to return, which significantly affects their future prospects. Postsecondary student populations are a diverse mix of local, immigrant, and international students but it is unclear if reasons for academic failure differ between groups. The aim of this review was to examine the published literature for contributors to postsecondary academic failure, including drop-out, among local, immigrant, and international students. A search of the literature was conducted using PubMed, ProQuest, EBSCOHOST, and PsycINFO on the topic for all articles published in English up to March 2016. The results showed that almost all data come from the Western countries. Several personal, sociocultural, and academic factors appear to be associated with postsecondary failure among all students. These include gender, low academic engagement, stress, psychological difficulties, low social support, and poor coping abilities. Immigrant and international students face additional challenges, such as loss of social networks, discrimination, acculturation, and language challenges. Limitations of the data include the relatively small body of literature (particularly from low- and middle-income countries), and lack of subgroup comparisons, such as of local, immigrant and international students. Clarification of the relative contribution of these factors to academic failure will facilitate the development of effective retention strategies, particularly those that focus on addressing psychological distress and building resilience.

Academic achievement, engagement and burnout among first year medical students

Stress may affect the sense of wellbeing and academic achievement of university students. To assess the relationship of academic engagement and burnout with academic achievement among first year medical students. The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale-Student and Maslach Burnout Inventory Student Survey (MBI-SS) were applied to 277 first year medical students of four universities. Their results were correlated with the grades obtained in the different courses. Moderately high engagement and low burnout levels were detected. There was a high level of satisfaction with studies and a moderate exhaustion level. Academic achievement was associated with the degree of engagement with studies but not with burnout. Conglomerate analysis detected a group of students with high levels of wellbeing, characterized by high levels of academic engagement and low burnout. Other group had moderate levels of engagement and lack of personal fulfilment. Other group, identified as extenuated, had high levels of personal exhaustion and depersonalization. Finally the disassociated group had a low academic engagement, low emotional exhaustion, high levels of depersonalization and lack of personal fulfillment. Academic achievement is associated with the level of engagement with studies but not with burnout.

Do teachers equate male and masculine with lower academic engagement? How students’ gender enactment triggers gender stereotypes at school

Girls presently outperform boys in overall academic success. Corresponding gender stereotypes portray male students as lazy and troublesome and female students as diligent and compliant. The present study investigated whether these stereotypes impact teachers’ perceptions of students and whether students’ visible enactment of their gender at school (behaving in a very masculine or feminine way) increases the impact of these stereotypes on teachers’ perceptions of students. We hypothesized that teachers would ascribe more behavior that impedes learning and less behavior that fosters learning to male students who enact masculinity as compared with male students who show gender-neutral behavior and female students. Three pilot studies (N = 104; N = 82; N = 86) yielded pretested material for a randomized vignette study of N = 104 teachers. The teachers read one randomly assigned vignette describing a male (or female) student enacting his (or her) gender (or not) and rated how likely this student would be to display behaviors that impede or foster learning in a 2 (between: target students’ gender) × 2 (between: gender enactment [yes/no]) × 2 (between: teachers’ gender) × 2 (within: ascribed behavior) factorial design. As expected, male students enacting masculinity were rated as showing the lowest amount of academic engagement. Results are discussed with regard to the current debate on the causes of boys’ lower academic success.

First-generation students' academic engagement and retention

This study investigates differences in academic engagement and retention between first-generation and non-first-generation undergraduate students. Utilizing the Student Experience in the Research University survey of 1864 first-year students at a large, public research university located in the United States, this study finds that first-generation students have lower academic engagement (as measured by the frequency with which students interacted with faculty, contributed to class discussions, brought up ideas from different courses during class discussions, and asked insightful questions in class) and lower retention as compared to non-first-generation students. Recommendations that higher education faculty can follow to promote the academic engagement and retention of first-generation students are addressed.

Getting Young People to Do the Right Thing

A COLLEAGUE at ECS, whose earliest years were spent a U.S. Air Force base in Germany, recalls that the first book he ever heard read to him as a child is Der Strummelpeter, a collection of German morality tales for children. In this book, boys who suck their thumbs have the offending digit unceremoniously dispatched by the tailor's scissors. Children who don't finish their dinner starve to death. And many, many other amusing anecdotes. You get the picture. point is, it's amazing the lengths to which people will go to get their children to do the right thing. And in the world of education policy, though we're not typically reading Der Strummelpeter to high school kids, policy makers over the last 30 years or so have been adopting one approach after another in an attempt to keep young people from making one of the biggest mistakes of their lives--dropping out of school. As many readers know, the efforts of the past have unfortunately been largely cookie-cutter policies and programs that have met with limited success. Recently, however, awakened by the more accurate graduation data that result from better methods of tracking who's leaving school (part of the larger recent push for general high school reform), researchers, policy makers, and even Oprah have taken a second look at the factors that lead students to drop out and are undertaking efforts that might be more likely to keep kids from making a decision with potentially dire consequences. One of my favorite reports to have come out this year is a white paper this topic by Craig Jerald for Achieve, Inc., and Jobs for the Future. Titled Identifying Potential Dropouts: Key Lessons for Building an Early Warning Data System, it synthesizes recent research and separates the myths from the facts about what contributes to young people's decision to say so long to the schoolhouse. Jerald's study notes that, contrary to what many believe, student demographics don't necessarily dictate who will stay in school and who will leave. Academic performance and engagement in school carry a great deal of weight in student decisions whether or not to drop Especially in urban districts, where high proportions of students have demographic risk factors, Jerald points out, very low academic performance and educational engagement can help discriminate the ones most likely to be the path to dropping out. Though risk factors themselves can't tell us who will tough it out through high school and who will leave, research points to one risk factor that appears to play a significant role in determining who graduates from high school. The On-Track Indicator as a Predictor of High School Graduation, another favorite study of mine, suggests that dropout prevention efforts should recognize the importance of the freshman year of high school. This 2005 paper from the Consortium Chicago School Research relates the findings of a study of high school completion rates among Chicago Public School students. researchers found that students who were on at the end of grade 9--by the researchers' definition, those who had earned enough credits to go to grade 10 and had failed no more than one semester in a core subject--were substantially less likely to drop out than their peers who did not meet one (or both) of the on-track criteria. Interestingly, the researchers also found that many students who came to high school with low test scores were track in grade 9 and finished high school in four years and that some students with good test scores in the middle grades did not make a successful transition transition to high school and ended up off track. Thus performance before high school is not a solid indicator of who's going to be walking across the stage to accept a sheepskin four years later. A 2006 report goes straight to the source. The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts is made up of the findings from focus groups of recent dropouts the reasons they dropped out and what would have made them stay in school. …

Black American students in an affluent suburb: a study of academic disengagement

John Ogbu has studied minority education from a comparative perspective for over 30 years. The study reported in this book--jointly sponsored by the community and the school district in Shaker Heights, Ohio--focuses on the academic performance of Black American students. Not only do these students perform less well than White students at every social class level, but also less well than immigrant minority students, including Black immigrant students. Furthermore, both middle-class Black students in suburban school districts, as well as poor Black students in inner-city schools are not doing well. Ogbu's analysis draws on data from observations, formal and informal interviews, and statistical and other data. He offers strong empirical evidence to support the cross-class existence of the problem. The book is organized in four parts: *Part I provides a description of the twin problems the study addresses--the gap between Black and White students in school performance and the low academic engagement of Black students; a review of conventional explanations; an alternative perspective; and the framework for the study. *Part II is an analysis of societal and school factors contributing to the problem, including race relations, Pygmalion or internalized White beliefs and expectations, levelling or tracking, the roles of teachers, counselors, and discipline. *Community factors--the focus of this study--are discussed in Part III. These include the educational impact of opportunity structure, collective identity, cultural and language or dialect frame of reference in schooling, peer pressures, and the role of the family. This research focus does not mean exonerating the system and blaming minorities, nor does it mean neglecting school and society factors. Rather, Ogbu argues, the role of community forces should be incorporated into the discussion of the academic achievement gap by researchers, theoreticians, policymakers, educators, and minorities themselves who genuinely want to improve the academic achievement of African American children and other minorities. *In Part IV, Ogbu presents a summary of the study's findings on community forces and offers recommendations--some of which are for the school system and some for the Black community. Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement is an important book for a wide range of researchers, professionals, and students, particularly in the areas of Black education, minority education, comparative and international education, sociology of education, educational anthropology, educational policy, teacher education, and applied anthropology.

Ecobehavioral Analysis of Instruction for At-Risk Language-Minority Students

In this article we describe an application of ecobehavioral analysis to the evaluation of instructional settings for language-minority students. We introduce the concept of ecobehavioral analysis and describe the Ecobehavioral System for the Contextual Recording of Interactional Bilingual Environments (ESCRIBE). ESCRIBE evaluates the instructional effectiveness of educational and second language acquisition programs serving language-minority learners in regular and special settings. We studied 2 instructional environments (regular and English-as-a-Second-Language classrooms) to determine the opportunities afforded to 24 at-risk language-minority students to acquire and negotiate a second language and academic content meaning. Results demonstrated that instructional environments and teacher variables within a setting have a profound effect on students' academic behaviors and language usage. In general, we found a pattern of minimal teacher attention to language development, low student academic engagement ...