Definition of Cognitive Engagement
Academic engagement is defined as students’ commitment or investment in school and is thought to influence students’ task management, classroom behaviors (Greenwood, Horton, & Utley, 2002), motivation (Linnenbrink & Pintrich, 2003), science attitudes, and academic achievement (Singh, Granville, & Dika, 2002). Cognitive engagement is originated from school engagement that includes three types of engagement: behavioral, emotional, and cognitive (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004). Behavioral engagement is defined as students’ behaviors identified in relation to their engagement such as school attendance, and participation in school activities. Emotional engagement is defined as students’ affective reactions to classroom such as happiness, sadness, and anxiety. Thirdly, cognitive engagement is defined as the students’ psychological investment in learning. Pintrich and Schrauben (1992) defined cognitive engagement as to include cognitive and motivational component. Motivational components include expectancy, value, and affect. Cognitive components include knowledge, learning strategies, and thinking strategies. Other researchers specifically view students’ self-regulation of their use of cognitive and metacognitive processes during acquisition and transformation of knowledge as a form of cognitive engagement (Corno & Mandinach, 1983; Mandinach & Corno, 1985). Therefore, cognitive engagement has been studied with different constructs such as motivation (Greene & Miller, 1996; Meece, Blumenfeld, & Hoyle, 1988; Walker, Greene, & Mansell, 2006) and perceptions of classroom tasks (Greene, Miller, Crowson, Duke, & Akey, 2004). Since cognitive engagement is defined and studied differently with disparate constructs by researchers, in this chapter, we adopt the definition by Fredricks et al. (2004) and Dole and Sinatra’s descriptions of levels of information processing during knowledge construction, to discuss the issue on examining young children’s cognitive engagement in science learning.