Student Engagement: What do we know and what should we do?

(2004) classify 44 engagement studies into behavioural, emotional, and cognitive
categories. Behavioural engagement is student participation in academic, social,
and extracurricular activities. Emotional engagement is considered to exist when
students have positive attitudes and reactions towards school, teachers, learning,
and peers. Cognitive engagement is thought to be present when students make
personal investment into learning in a focused, strategic, and self-regulating way
(p. 58).
Anderson, Christenson, Sinclair, and Lehr (2004, p. 110) divide engagement into
four types: behavioural, academic, cognitive, and psychological. While their
categories are similar to those described by Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris
(2004) above, they use academic engagement to specify time spent doing learning
activities as opposed to general behavioural engagement where students may be
participating in nonacademic pursuits. In their model, psychological engagement
encompasses similar aspects to Fredricks et al.’s (2004) emotional engagement.
(Harris, 2008, p. 59).
Harris (2008) also points out that some view the categories of student engagement in a
hierarchical manner – wherein some forms of engagement are more important or indicate
higher levels of engagement than others. She cited Finn’s (1989) work on academic
engagement, as an example, in her research: “Finn (1989) puts forward a hierarchical
taxonomy based primarily on specific types of behavioral engagement. Students whose
behaviors correspond with higher levels in the taxonomy are considered to be ‘more’
engaged) (Harris, 2008, p. 59). However, others don’t assign any levels of importance,
but instead feel that each level is “equally important to student engagement (Fredricks,
Blumenfeld, and Paris, 2004; Blumenfeld, Modell, Bartko, Secada, Fredricks, Friedel, et
al., 2005”, as cited in Harris, 2008, p. 58). This begs the question: Must all students be
engaged on all aspects to be successful? Willms (2003) work, for one, suggests that they
do not.
Nearly all authors note the need for further collaborative research. One area of agreement
is the unified call for clearer definitions of engagement. For now, we provide some of the
more recent definitions and categories for student engagement found in the literature.
Chapman (2003), for example, notes a shift in definitions in the past years from a time-on
task-based perspective to more compliance-based definitions.
More recently, at least two distinct definitions have appeared in the literature
(Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991). In the first, student engagement has been used to
depict students’ willingness to participate in routine school activities such as
attending classes, submitting required work, and following teachers’ directions in
class… Defined in this way, school engagement overlaps considerably with
compliance, which in its more general form involves meeting expectations
explicit in school contexts.
The second definition used focuses on more subtle cognitive, behavioral, and
affective indicators of student engagement in specific learning tasks (Chapman,
2003, p. 2).
Student Engagement: What do we know and what should we do? 18