Читать книгу Student Engagement Techniques - Elizabeth F. Barkley - Страница 14

One of the earliest pairings of the term engagement with learning, at least at the college level, occurs in Pascarella and Terenzini's (1991) treatise on the impact of college on students:

Perhaps the strongest conclusion that can be made is the least surprising. Simply put, the greater the student's involvement or engagement in academic work or in the academic experience of college, the greater his or her level of knowledge acquisition and general cognitive development. (p. 848)

A decade later, in his influential Higher Education White Paper, Russ Edgerton (2001), former director of the education program of the Pew Charitable Trusts, pointed to the need for students to “engage in the tasks” that specialists perform in order to really understand the concepts of the discipline (p. 32). In this same paper, Edgerton coined the phrase “pedagogies of engagement” to mean instructional approaches designed to help students learn the knowledge and skills they need to be engaged citizens and workers (p. 38). Building on Edgerton's and others' work, educational psychologist and former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Lee Shulman (2002), placed engagement at the foundation of his learning taxonomy, stating simply and clearly: “Learning begins with student engagement …” (p. 2).

Most of these early uses of the term focused on student engagement in course-level learning activities. In the late 2000s, however, researchers began to think of engagement across students' college careers, taking an overarching perspective that considers student engagement in course-level learning activities as well as extracurricular ones. Kuh (2001) defined engagement as “student involvement in educationally purposeful activities” (p. 12). From this conception, the National Survey on Student Engagement (NSSE) and associated efforts such as the Community College Survey on Student Engagement (CCSSE) aim to measure student engagement. They define engagement as the frequency with which students participate in activities that represent effective educational practices and conceive of it as a pattern of involvement in a variety of activities and interactions both in and out of the classroom and throughout a student's college career. “Student engagement has two key components,” explain Kuh et al. (2005/2010):

The first is the amount of time and effort students put into their studies and other activities that lead to the experiences and outcomes that constitute student success. The second is the ways the institution allocates resources and organizes learning opportunities and services to induce students to participate in and benefit from such activities. (p. 9)

The NSSE work has spurred much interest and important research around student engagement at the institutional level, focusing on time involved in specific educational activities across a student's college experience.

Simultaneously, many educators have continued in their efforts to study student engagement in course-level learning. Many of these researchers have come to their investigations through the lens of cognitive psychology, focusing on student investment in and intellectual effort toward learning. As Velden (2013) suggests:

Within the community of academic practitioners, engagement by students is most commonly interpreted in relation to the psychology of individual learning: the degree at which students engage with their studies in terms of motivation, the depth of their intellectual perception or simply studiousness. Engaged students are viewed as taking ownership for their own learning, working together with [faculty] on ensuring academic success and accepting the role of engaged and willing apprentice to an academic master. (p. 78)

Like the definition above, we find that when many of today's college teachers describe student engagement, they tend to underscore the importance of both the feeling and the thinking aspects of engagement. Feeling and thinking are central to our own understanding of engagement as well. Within the context of a college classroom, we propose this definition of student engagement:

Student engagement is the mental state students are in while learning, representing the intersection of feeling and thinking.

We will explore these two factors in more depth in the following sections.