Engagement: I know it when I see it. I think.

Engagement is one of those funny education phenomena. Most educators can tell when a student is or is not engaged, and think engagement is a predictor of student success, but coming up with a clear definition has been tricky (see here, here). Fredricks' "ABC" model of engagement (i.e., affective, behavioral, cognitive) is one of the most well-known, but there are other conceptualizations and many overlap with constructs like motivation or self-regulation. And despite, or perhaps because of, all the hubbub about student engagement, there hasn't been a really comprehensive meta-analysis of how student engagement relates to academic achievement and student well-being. Until now.

Wong et al. (2024) conducted a rigorous meta-analysis of the relations among types of student engagement, academic achievement, and student well-being. The relations were largely positive and pretty practically significant, as one might expect. Interestingly, teacher-measured engagement was a stronger predictor than student self-report, perhaps because teachers were factoring in students' prior knowledge or performance. Likewise, the relationships were larger for teacher-developed tests than standardized tests, likely because teachers count engagement, to some degree, in grading.

What I thought was most interesting was the authors' work to differentiate subtypes of ABC engagement, and what they recommended for future theory development:

"One significant finding is how the three engagement dimensions can be further differentiated into different subtypes. Some subtypes (e.g., affective learning, effortful) are concerned with students’ learning experiences and exhibited strong associations with aca- demic achievement, while others (e.g., relational, affective school, participatory) are concerned with school or social connectedness and exhibited strong associations with student well-being. In view of this observation, we encourage scholars to view student engagement as a metaconstruct consisting of two distinct components, namely learning activity engagement and school community engagement (Wong & Liem, 2022). The former refers to an active mental state in learning activities that relates to students’ (academic) work role, while the latter refers to a state of connection with the school community that relates to students’ role as a member of the school" (p. 70)

It makes sense to me that engagement has both a learning and a community aspect, with each related to the other and differently related to academic and well-being outcomes. With this meta-analysis, it feels like we are one step closer to defining engagement and differentiating it from other constructs. Doing so would likely help educators better know it and better see it.