Student Engagement Theory

Learning Engagement Engagement defined as the simultaneous employment and expression of a person’s preferred self in task behaviors that promote connections to work and to others, personal presence (physical, cognitive, and emotional) and active full performance (Truss et al, 2013). Student engagement, described as the tendency to be behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively involved in academic activities, is a key construct in motivation research (Thijs & Verkuyten, 2009).

The student’s psychological investment in and effort directed toward learning, understanding, or mastering the knowledge, skills or crafts that academic work is intended to promote is called student’s engagement. Although student’s engagement as academic participation

Engagement Theory specifically promotes student activities that “involve cognitive processes such as creating, problem-solving, reasoning, decision-making, and evaluation” in which students are “motivated to learn due to the meaningful nature of the learning environment and activities”.

Engagement Theory comprises three components:

1. Relating: learning activities that occur in a group context.

2. Creating: learning activities that are project-based.

3. Donating: learning activities that have an outside (authentic) focus.

Relating, that is, collaborative work, forces students to “clarify and verbalize their problems,thereby facilitating solutions”. Creating involves student participation in the development of their assessment tasks: “students have to define the project and focus their efforts on application of ideas to a specific context”. Donating “stresses the value of making a useful contribution while learning”, a feature that motivates learners because they are engaged with and activity they value (Kearsley & Shneiderman

The stability dimension captures whether causes change over time or not. Controllability contrasts causes one can control, such as skill/efficacy, from causes one cannot control, such as aptitude, mood, others’ actions, and luck. Weiner and his colleagues demonstrated that each of these causal dimensions has unique influences on various aspects of achievement behavior. The stability dimension influences individuals’ expectancies for success: Attributing an outcome to a stable cause such as ability or skill has a stronger influence on expectancies for future success than attributing an outcome to an unstable cause such as effort. The locus of control dimension is linked most strongly to affective reactions (Weiner,