Student Engagement: A Close Look into the Phenomenon and Its Importance for All Students

Format

Poster Presentation

Location

Harborside Center

Strand #1

Academic Achievement & School Leadership

Strand #2

Social & Emotional Skills

Relevance

This work is imperative to increasing academic achievement reducing the rate of student dropout. Research has shown that when students are engaged within their academic atmosphere, they both build and strength their social and emotional skills, as well as their academic skills.

Brief Program Description

Student engagement is a multi-domain phenomenon that emerged as a theoretical model for understanding and structuring interventions to prevent student dropouts. Researchers are interested in the phenomenon for all students to increase the quality of education. This paper seeks to create a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of student engagement, connect it to the student learning process, and uncover factors that both promote and inhibit student engagement within the classroom.

Summary

While student engagement is both complex and multi-dimensional, the research literature is clear that student engagement is both a way of behaving and a state of mind and points out that the factors leading to this behavior and state of mind are interacting and do not stand independently.

Marks (2000) parses out these domains into more discrete activities such as the psychological attention, interest, investment, and the effort students apply to learning. Klem & Connell (2004) and Sutherland, Wehby, & Copeland, (2008) describe on-going engagement as the extent to which students prepare for class, pay attention in class, exert effort on their schoolwork, and believe that doing well in school is personally important. Appleton et al., (2006) and Skinner, Kindermann, Connell, & Wellborn (2007) discuss student engagement as a process leading to a connection between a person and an assigned activity.

It is evident that while researchers use different terminology and chose to study the phenomenon in various ways, all of them are speaking to the same occurrence and reach the same conclusion: student engagement is a process involving overlapping behavioral, psychological, and cognitive components, and that through this process students are motivated, increasing academic success. This process is a reciprocal one where the components and factors that lead to engagement also increase engagement when present.

Evidence

This paper is a literature review which will serve as the basis for my upcoming research project with a juvenile justice facility in NC. This is an extensive review of engagement and student dropout literature to serve as a foundation for further work in the area.

Biographical Sketch

Helen is a fourth year Ph.D. student in the School of Education at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill systems of education with the juvenile justice system. She currently teaches English Language Arts within a juvenile justice facility in North Carolina. In her free time she enjoys spending time with her daughters, husband, and animals, running, reading, and going to the beach.

Keyword Descriptors

student engagement, academic success, dropout, engagement

Presentation Year

2016

Start Date

3-8-2016 4:00 PM

End Date

3-8-2016 5:30 PM

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS
 
Mar 8th, 4:00 PM Mar 8th, 5:30 PM

Student Engagement: A Close Look into the Phenomenon and Its Importance for All Students

Harborside Center

Student engagement is a multi-domain phenomenon that emerged as a theoretical model for understanding and structuring interventions to prevent student dropouts. Researchers are interested in the phenomenon for all students to increase the quality of education. This paper seeks to create a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of student engagement, connect it to the student learning process, and uncover factors that both promote and inhibit student engagement within the classroom.