Essay On Student Engagement In Education

In recent decades, the quality of teaching and learning in higher education has been under close scrutiny from governments and consumers alike due to the increasing accountability of the public sector (Byrne & Flood, 2003; Stensaker, 2007). Student learning is a core goal of universities, whose governance processes must place considerable emphasis on monitoring student learning performance. Therefore, the quality of student learning must be a core objective within institutional and system-level governance arrangements (Jones, 2013).

To ensure that higher education institutions demonstrate excellence in teaching and learning, an increasing number of surveys focusing on students’ perceptions of teaching quality and learning experiences have

According to this perspective, student engagement has been defined as the ‘time and effort students devote to educationally purposeful activities’ (Kuh et al., 2008; Radloff & Coates, 2010). Students must be involved in useful and productive activities determined by educators and guided by governmental policy or societal expectations (Hagel, Carr, & Delvin, 2012). These nationwide surveys have usually focused on a range of institutional practices and student behaviour related to learning and development, such as the time spent on tasks, teaching practices, student-faculty interactions and institutional requirements or services. Although these studies are helpful for explaining the relationship between student behaviour and institutional practices, the understanding of student engagement from a behavioural perspective is too narrow. Just as Kahu (2013) observed, focusing on the elements that institutions can control excludes a wide range of other explanatory variables, including students’ motivations, emotions and expectations. More importantly, some discrepancies may exist between students’ behavioural participation and their psychological states of engagement (Wefald & Downey,

Engagement is a complex and multifaceted construct comprising three dimensions, including behavioural, emotional and cognitive engagement (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004; Hagel, Carr, & Delvin, 2012). Behavioural engagement focuses on the extent to which students become involved in academic, social and extracurricular activities. Emotional engagement refers to students’ affective responses to their teachers, classmates, academics and institutions. Cognitive engagement relates to students’ mental investment, which incorporates thoughtfulness and a willingness to exert the effort necessary to comprehend complex ideas and master difficult skills. In this sense, engagement can be seen as an overarching meta-construct that attempts to integrate the diverse lines of research that help explain student success (Kahu,