What sort of engagement are you looking for?

We often speak of engagement as if it is a binary: students are either engaged or unengaged. Students are either raising their hands to participate in an activity, or they are asleep. We can all recognize engagement when we see it. An engaged class is bustling, full of an energy that any casual observer could notice and admire.

We tend to emphasize behavior when looking at engagement because behavior is easy to quantify, modify, assess, and control.  We set assignments. We dictate terms of the conversation. We introduce new tools or activities that encourage our students to behave in new and interesting ways. When we focus too much attention on student behavior as an indication of engagement, however, we miss out on some of the more subtle (and often more important) elements of student engagement.  

When education researchers look at engagement, they see engagement as multidimensional, often dividing it into three, four or an entire spectrum of categories that attempt to capture the complexity of learning. The most popular divisions tend to fall along the lines of behavioral and cognitive engagement with each classification being subdivided into additional categories. However, the groupings aren’t as important as the act of separating them out for analysis in the first place, and as we prepare to develop our courses this semester, and in future semesters, for face-to-face, blended and online courses, considering the qualities each form of engagement requires can increase student success.

We’ve already mentioned behavioral engagement, so let’s start by defining that a bit more precisely. Behavioral engagement requires participation. It is the performance of learning, where students actively complete tasks, either alone or in groups. Behavioral engagement can be demonstrated by completing a quiz or participating in a class debate or posting on a discussion board. Students are performing learning when they are writing research papers, building websites, or using clickers. We need behavioral engagement to assess their learning. If they don’t complete the assignments, we can’t record what they’ve learned. Of course, the mention of assessment reveals the potential flaw in relying too heavily on behavior as a means of determining successful student engagement. We’ve all had students who completed every single assignment yet demonstrated no clear evidence of intellectual growth.

When a class’s behavioral engagement doesn’t meet our expectations, it’s tempting to place the blame on the behavior. We wonder whether there is a better activity, a new game, or a new tool that will somehow make them perform learning more effectively. There’s nothing wrong with switching it up when we feel like students aren’t meeting the objectives, but sometimes focusing on behavioral engagement can lead to adopting activities that emphasize the wrong type of learning. New tools are only helpful if the students use them to meet your learning objectives. If students spend most of their time learning the rules of a game or the functions of a tool, then they are behaviorally engaged, but they’re still not meeting your objectives.

The key to improving engagement, then, may not be to look for new behaviors from students. It may be to look at other areas of student engagement and then consider them in light of the behaviors you’re asking the students to perform. I mentioned cognitive engagement earlier. I used cognitive as a sort of catchall for a long list of terms education researchers use to look at the thinking piece of engagement. Some call it psychological, some divide it into emotional and cognitive, some add relative engagement and affective engagement. For our purposes, emotional and cognitive might be the most approachable, and they are the types you’ll most often see defined.

We might think of emotional engagement as the students’ attachment to the learning, their attitude about their own ability and the subject at hand. Students come to each of our subjects with preconceptions. Their emotional engagement, at least at the beginning of the semester, is going to be guided by their history with the subject matter. As an English teacher, I’ve met hundreds of students who swear they can’t write. They engage with the materials in the hopes that if they just perform the action appropriately, they’ll escape the class. These students ask questions like: “how many words are in a sentence?” or “how many sentences are in a paragraph.” These students may be behaviorally engaged, but in order to really embrace the subject and learn the material, we must help them become emotionally engaged as well. This is where we have to convince the students that our subject has a purpose that relates to their life goals (TILT can help here). This is also where small assignments that allow for repeated opportunities for success and feedback can help them build confidence that they need to engage emotionally with the class. Emotional engagement improves behavioral engagement. The more emotionally invested students are with their projects, the more likely they are to push themselves not only behaviorally but also cognitively.

Cognitive engagement might be best defined as intellectual curiosity. Students who are emotionally engaged with your subject matter tend to develop a curiosity about it. This curiosity drives them to ask questions and do extra research. Hopefully, all of us know the joy of having a student announce that she was so interested in a concept that she went outside the bounds of the assignment and read an extra article or even just searched for a Wikipedia entry. Cognitive engagement is the highest form of engagement, and it might be the most difficult to elicit, but there are some techniques you can try. This is where a well-timed game might bring an idea to life for them (as long as the game is sophisticated enough to encourage continued curiosity and not just behavioral engagement). This is also where you might capitalize on their curiosity about the city to encourage deeper disciplinary thought. Universal Design for Learning encourages assignment choice as a means of encouraging cognitive and emotional engagement because it allows students to perform their learning in a medium that is most engaging to them.

As you work with your students this semester, you might consider how you can develop your assignments to encourage all types of engagement. Compliance through behavioral engagement is certainly important, but don’t forget to design assignments that engage your students emotionally and cognitively to improve their overall performance.

For more information on the different forms of engagement, check out the following resources:

Boykin, A.Wade, and Pedro Noguera. “Chapter 3: Engagement.” Creating the Opportunity to Learn. [Electronic Resource] : Moving from Research to Practice to Close the Achievement Gap. ASCD, 2011. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=cat06552a&AN=gsu.9913741429902931&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Clark, Ruth Colvin, and Richard E. Mayer. “Chapter 11: Engagement in E-Learning.”  E-Learning and the Science of Instruction : Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning. Fourth edition., Wiley, 2016. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=cat06552a&AN=gsu.9914810496502931&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Handelsman, Mitchell M., et al. “A Measure of College Student Course Engagement.” Journal of Educational Research, vol. 98, no. 3, Jan. 2005, pp. 184–192. EBSCOhost, doi:10.3200/JOER.98.3.184-192.