Behavioral Engagement of Elementary School Students in Turkey: A Mixed Method Study

Introduction

Rapid changes in modern science and technology changed the education system and the outcomes of education programs. Engagement which creates a structure to understand taking part in education, establishes an integrative relationship between students and school activities (Ainley, 2012). Measuring the interest and engagement of students at all levels of education from pre-school to high school to the arranged activities will provide a better understanding of learning processes that enable the acquisition of skills specific to a particular area. Researchers and educators started to be interested in the concept of engagement to identify particularly the students who are in an academic and developmental risk group, not interested in learning environments, and have a low level of engagement in learning processes, with the aim of making effective arrangements in teaching processes.

Engagement, involves an activity that is energized, given attention and sustained, or students’ interactions with academic tasks (Skinner & Pitzer, 2012). Engagement is also the application of the motivational development model (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Historical, economic, theoretical and practical reasons led to the booming interest in the concept engagement recently (Fredricks, Blumenfeld & Paris, 2004). Engagement is a multidimensional concept specified to be a significant predictor of school dropout rates, the decline in the rate of education (National Research Council & Institute of Medicine, 2004; Reschly et al., 2008) academic success in advanced teaching levels (Bierman et al., 2009; Li et al., 2010; Taylor & Nelms, 2006). With the increasing interest in this concept, different classifications are made for engagement and it is evaluated with different dimensions (Fredricks & McColskey, 2012). At first, it is considered two-dimensional as behavior and emotion (Finn, 1989; Finn & Voelkl, 1993; Ryan, Stiller & Lynch, 1994). It was stated that behavior dimension is related to involvement effort and emotion dimension on the other hand is related to interest, belonging, and positive emotions (Skinner, Kindermann & Furrer, 2009). Other scholars explained that engagement is a three-dimensional concept including behavior, emotion and cognitive dimension (Jimerson et al., 2003; Wigfield et al., 2008). Moreover, this three-dimensional structure has also been described with four dimensions comprising academic, behavioral, cognitive, and psychology (Appleton et al., 2006). This study focuses on behavioral engagement since the students’ involvement in the learning process and activities will be observed by researchers through certain aspects.

In this section, first of all, behavioural engagement will centre on students’ involvement in classroom activities in line with specific indicators. The results of the analysis of the behavioural engagement levels of elementary school students determined according to the observations delivered by the researcher and the reports of primary school teachers will be shared. Then, students’ engagement levels and teachers’ views on engagement indicators, factors and engagement in the classroom will be discussed in line with the results obtained from the studies conducted in the literature. Recommendations for future research on the study results will be shown on behavioural engagement in Turkey sample.