Engagement refers to a learner's interest in their own learning. Engaged students care about what they are learning and spend the time necessary to learn more. Learner engagement leads to increased achievement in a course and also increased satisfaction with the learning experience. This chapter explores elements of engagement from both a researcher and practitioner perspective. The authors explore the definition of engagement along with an explanation of the most influential theories of engagement. They also explain what classroom practices are most likely to build engagement and suggest future research directions.
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The best place to begin a discussion about engagement is with the definition of the construct. However, with engagement, there’s no strong consensus in the literature on what defines an engaged student (Henrie, Halverson, & Graham, 2015).
One approach is to look at student behaviors and define engagement in terms of what students do. Hu and Kuh (2002) looked at engagement as effort. If a student expends significant effort in a course, then they must be engaged in the learning. In a later study, Kuh, Kinzie, Buckley, Bridges, and Hayek (2007) continued to focus on effort and defined engagement as “participation in educationally effective practices, both inside and outside the classroom, which leads to a range of measurable outcomes” (p. 44). Notice that Kuh et al. (2007) focused exclusively on the things a student does when they are engaged. Merwin (1969) looked at time on task, hypothesizing that if a student spends significant time in a course, then they must be engaged in content. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), one of the largest ongoing studies of student engagement in higher education, defines engagement in terms of student activities that they engage in as part of the learning process (Kuh, 2009). They look at a student’s perceptions of the level of academic challenge of their studies as well as the number of times a student participates in active learning, collaborative learning, and interactions with faculty members among other activities such as going to the library or accessing library resources (Kuh, 2009). Kuh’s (2009) effort-focused definition can be applied within the K–12 online classroom by looking at the student’s behaviors on the learning management system (LMS). Students who are engaged will spend significant time on course pages, they will initiate communications with their teachers, and they will consistently submit assignments.