Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty

By Elizabeth F. Barkley and Claire H. Major

Practical Strategies and Winning Techniques to Engage and Enhance Student Learning

The revised and updated second edition of Student Engagement Techniques is a much-needed guide to engaging today's information-overloaded students. The book is a comprehensive resource that offers college teachers a dynamic model for engaging students and includes over one hundred tips, strategies, and techniques that have been proven to help teachers across all disciplines motivate and connect with their students.

This edition will provide a deeper understanding of what student engagement is, demonstrate new strategies for engaging students, uncover implementation strategies for engaging students in online learning environments, and provide new examples on how to implement these techniques into STEM fields.

"Student Engagement Techniques is among a handful of books—several of which are in this series!—designed specifically to help instructors, regardless of experience, create the conditions that make meaningful, engaged learning not just possible but highly probable." —Michael Palmer, Ph.D., Director, Center for Teaching Excellence, Professor, General Faculty, University of Virginia

"This practical guide to motivating and engaging students reads like a quite enjoyable series of conversations held over coffee with skilled colleagues. It has been met with delight from every faculty member and graduate instructor that we've shared the book with!" —Megan L. Mittelstadt, Ph.D., Director, Center for Teaching and Learning, The University of Georgia

"Student Engagement Techniques belongs in the hands of 21st century instructors and faculty developers alike. Its research-based, specific, yet broadly applicable strategies can increase student engagement in face-to-face and online courses in any discipline." —Jeanine A. Irons, Ph.D., Faculty Developer for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence, Syracuse University

"This book is an essential resource for faculty seeking to better engage with their students. Anyone seeking a clear, research-based, and actionable guide needs a copy of Student Engagement Techniques on their shelf!" —Michael S. Harris, Ed.D., Associate Professor of Higher Education, Director, Center for Teaching Excellence, Southern Methodist University

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Apr 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781119686897

Book preview

Preface

TEACHERS IN INSTITUTIONS across the country tell us that teaching today can be tough. The twitch speed pace and multilayered delivery of modern media can make a lecture feel so incredibly slow and boring, one student reported all the blood had left his head and he feared he'd pass out (El-Shamy, 2004, p. 24). Globalization and open-door access have filled our classrooms with learners reflecting such a dizzying array of backgrounds and academic preparedness that teachers are often hard-pressed to find a collective starting point or the commonalities that create a sense of community. Abundant information that can be accessed at split-second speed has redefined what students should be learning and created unprecedented opportunities for academic dishonesty. A panoply of pressures make some classrooms a crucible of tensions that can erupt in incivility ranging from simple lack of consideration to overt aggression. For many of us teaching today, competing for the attention of our students and engaging them in meaningful learning is a profound and ongoing challenge.

But, there is a flipside. Even if college teachers did have the performance skills and production support to put on a show that matches the level of sheer sensory stimulation supplied by today's video and computer games, music videos, films, and television shows, it wouldn't matter—engaging students doesn't mean entertaining them. It means they are thinking and investing emotional and mental energy in their work. Although the diversity of today's students can be a challenge, it also means students are bringing a rich array of experiences, insights, and ideas to their learning. The information and communication revolution can make our roles much more interesting than being mere dispensers of information. And finally, perhaps we can teach students—particularly those with short fuses—how to resolve conflicts in ways that can contribute to a happier, safer future.

Audience

This handbook was written for teachers like us who work in the trenches of academe. Our primary purpose is to offer teaching colleagues, current and aspiring, a wide variety of tips, strategies, and techniques so that they can transform what could be a daunting task into one that is stimulating and rewarding. We have striven to create a compendium of useful, practical ideas that readers will find enhances the classroom experience for teachers and students alike. We hope it will also be useful to faculty developers, instructional designers, department chairs, and other academic administrators interested in promoting teaching and improving learning.

Book Overview

As it was in the original book, the second edition of this handbook is divided into three parts. In Part One: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Student Engagement, we discuss a theoretical model for defining student engagement in the college classroom as the synergistic interaction between motivation and active learning. Part Two: Tips and Strategies offers 50 specific suggestions on topics such as how to increase motivation, promote active learning, build community, help students learn holistically, and ensure students are appropriately challenged. Part Three:Student Engagement Techniques (SETs) includes step-by-step directions for 50 learning activities that can be used across many types of disciplines. The techniques are organized into categories based on learning goals ranging from helping students acquire basic knowledge, skills, and understanding to developing attitudes, values, and self-awareness. Each technique includes purpose and description, step-by-step directions, examples of the implementation of that technique in specific academic disciplines, online implementation ideas, variations and extensions, observations and advice, and key resources. Rather than reading this book in a linear fashion, readers are encouraged to thumb through it or start at the point that is most useful and appealing to them.

We have also made several important changes in the second edition of the book. In Part One, for example, we have included a more extended discussion of what student engagement is, drawing upon literature that has been published since the first edition. We have also described the process of student engagement. In Part Two, we have provided additional strategies for engaging students. Since technology has advanced significantly in the past decade, we have added information in Part Three about how to implement more of the techniques in the online learning environment. In addition, we have taken care to describe how these techniques are used in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields.

Sources

Student engagement is really about effective teaching, and the literature on how to teach well is huge. Neither of us are educational psychologists, so especially in the conceptual framework that constitutes Part One, we relied on Brophy's (2004), Svinicki's (2004), and Wlodkowski's (2008) excellent syntheses of the research and literature on student motivation and on Sousa's (2006) informative and accessible work on how the brain learns. Readers who are interested in learning more about motivation or the brain are encouraged to go to these original sources. For Part Two and Part Three, we pulled from any source that had a good idea: books, journals, teaching and learning newsletters, corporate training manuals, websites, and even workshop handouts. Some ideas come from our own experiences in the classroom; others come from manuscript reviewers, colleagues, and students. We also pulled from the literature on good teaching as well as upon the expertise of teachers in colleges and universities around the country. We have tried to attribute accurately, preferably to published sources, but some information came to us without attribution. Teaching ideas and techniques are often disseminated by word-of-mouth and become part of general lore and practice. The result of our extensive searching and compiling information is that very little in this handbook is new. Our contribution is to pull it together into a single resource and cast it in a format accessible to discipline-oriented faculty. We have done our best to widely cite and acknowledge sources when possible.

Acknowledgments

WE ARE DEEPLY indebted to Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross for their seminal work in creating the prototype for this handbook with Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers (Jossey-Bass 1993). Through the years, we have worked with K. Patricia Cross, and we used the classroom assessment techniques (CATs) structure for our books in the college teaching techniques series. Pat's writing and thinking have left an indelible imprint throughout this current work. Our decision to dedicate the book to her is rooted in immense gratitude for her inspirational guidance.

For the first edition of this book, numerous people gave support, insightful comments, and constructive criticism, including David Brightman, Jessica Egbert, and Aneesa Davenport at Jossey-Bass. Others, from a variety of affiliations, included James Rhem, Jillian Kinzie, Kay McClenney, L. Dee Fink, Judith Ouimet, Robert Smallwood, Maryellen Weimer, and members of Elizabeth's Instructional Team—Robert Hartwell, Milissa Carey, and Baomi Watson.

In this second edition, Elizabeth invited Claire to collaborate, as we have done with three other books in Wiley's Jossey-Bass College Teaching Techniques Series: Collaborative Learning Techniques, Learning Assessment Techniques, and Interactive Lecturing Techniques. For the second edition of this book, we offer our thanks to Robyn Hammontree for her excellent contributions on how to implement these techniques online. We also thank Liz Johnson, for sharing her knowledge of STEM and providing us with her insights about how these techniques are used in this increasingly important area. And we thank Matt Fifolt for his suggestions for the manuscript. Finally, to our husbands, Eric and Ted, we offer our deepest, heartfelt gratitude for their ongoing support and understanding.

Part One

A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Student Engagement

Chapter 1

What Does Student Engagement Mean?

MOST OF US chose a field of scholarly endeavor because somewhere along the line we developed a passion for it. Arguably, part of the attraction of a career in academia is the opportunity to share our enthusiasm with others and possibly even recruit new disciples to the discipline. It is therefore disheartening to look out into a classroom and see disengaged students. They may stare at us vacantly or perhaps even hostilely when we attempt to pull them into class discussion and then bolt for the door like freed prisoners the moment it seems safe to do so. Equally distressing are students who obsessively focus on their grades but seem to care little about the learning the grades are supposed to represent. Why do some students bother to register for the course if they are not interested in learning what we are teaching? Why do some students go to such great efforts to cheat when they would learn so much more if they invested even half that effort in studying? Why is it sometimes so hard to get students to think … to care … to participate … to engage?

These, and similarly troubling questions, are part of a national, even international, conversation on student engagement. The focus of the conversation varies, largely because higher education today is astonishingly diverse. Whether the class is large or small, lecture or seminar, onsite or online, it can be a challenge to get students to engage. Whether we are simply attempting to get students to show up or take out their ear buds, or alternately, trying to challenge students to use higher-order thinking, we are all facing the same question: How do we get students to engage in their learning?

The unifying thread among these challenges is engagement, but exactly what student engagement means is not entirely clear. In an appropriately titled article Engaged Learning: Are We All on the Same Page?, Bowen (2005) observes that despite the emerging emphasis on engagement, as evidenced by the number of vision statements, strategic plans, learning outcomes, and agendas of national reform movements that strive to create engaged learning and engaged learners, an explicit consensus about what we actually mean by engagement or why it is important is lacking (p. 3). As his statement suggests, the concept of engagement simply means different things to different people. Swaner (2007) expands on this idea, stating that Rather than being concretely defined in the literature, the concept of engaged learning emerges from multiple frameworks and educational practices (para. 2). Indeed, there are many different lenses through which one can view the concept of engagement, from cognitive to social psychology, to sociology, to education, and beyond.

What is clear is that it is exceedingly difficult to be against student engagement. Who doesn't want a course full of bright, energetic, and engaged students? That we all hope and strive for student engagement is testament to the concept. So, while some have criticized the term for vagueness, we instead argue that we should celebrate its useful ambiguity: it is a multifaceted, multidimensional metaconcept that gets at something deep and central to teaching and learning in higher education. We argue that we can and should view and study the concept through many different lenses so that we can ultimately understand its core features and elements and in turn use this knowledge to enhance student learning.

While we celebrate the breadth of the concept, we also acknowledge that educators need to agree on a common vocabulary surrounding the concept of student engagement so that we can have meaningful conversations and advance the field of knowledge. Our purpose in Part One of this book, then, is to provide context for how the term is commonly used, share our own definition, and offer a conceptual framework for understanding and promoting student engagement.

About the Term

One of the earliest pairings of the term engagement with learning, at least at the college level, occurs in Pascarella and Terenzini's (1991) treatise on the impact of college on students:

Perhaps the strongest conclusion that can be made is the least surprising. Simply put, the greater the student's involvement or engagement in academic work or in the academic experience of college, the greater his or her level of knowledge acquisition and general cognitive development. (p. 848)

A decade later, in his influential Higher Education White Paper, Russ Edgerton (2001), former director of the education program of the Pew Charitable Trusts, pointed to the need for students to engage in the tasks that specialists perform in order to really understand the concepts of the discipline (p. 32). In this same paper, Edgerton coined the phrase pedagogies of engagement to mean instructional approaches designed to help students learn the knowledge and skills they need to be engaged citizens and workers (p. 38). Building on Edgerton's and others' work, educational psychologist and former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Lee Shulman (2002), placed engagement at the foundation of his learning taxonomy, stating simply and clearly: Learning begins with student engagement … (p. 2).

Most of these early uses of the term focused on student engagement in course-level learning activities. In the late 2000s, however, researchers began to think of engagement across students' college careers, taking an overarching perspective that considers student engagement in course-level learning activities as well as extracurricular ones. Kuh (2001) defined engagement as student involvement in educationally purposeful activities (p. 12). From this conception, the National Survey on Student Engagement (NSSE) and associated efforts such as the Community College Survey on Student Engagement (CCSSE) aim to measure student engagement. They define engagement as the frequency with which students participate in activities that represent effective educational practices and conceive of it as a pattern of involvement in a variety of activities and interactions both in and out of the classroom and throughout a student's college career. Student engagement has two key components, explain Kuh et al. (2005/2010):

The first is the amount of time and effort students put into their studies and other activities that lead to the experiences and outcomes that constitute student success. The second is the ways the institution allocates resources and organizes learning opportunities and services to induce students to participate in and benefit from such activities. (p. 9)

The NSSE work has spurred much interest and important research around student engagement at the institutional level, focusing on time involved in specific educational activities across a student's college experience.

Simultaneously, many educators have continued in their efforts to study student engagement in course-level learning. Many of these researchers have come to their investigations through the lens of cognitive psychology, focusing on student investment in and intellectual effort toward learning. As Velden (2013) suggests:

Within the community of academic practitioners, engagement by students is most commonly interpreted in relation to the psychology of individual learning: the degree at which students engage with their studies in terms of motivation, the depth of their intellectual perception or simply studiousness. Engaged students are viewed as taking ownership for their own learning, working together with [faculty] on ensuring academic success and accepting the role of engaged and willing apprentice to an academic master. (p. 78)

Like the definition above, we find that when many of today's college teachers describe student engagement, they tend to underscore the importance of both the feeling and the thinking aspects of engagement. Feeling and thinking are central to our own understanding of engagement as well. Within the context of a college classroom, we propose this definition of student engagement:

Student engagement is the mental state students are in while learning, representing the intersection of feeling and thinking.

We will explore these two factors in more depth in the following sections.

The Feeling Aspect of Engagement

When asked, we often hear teachers describe engagement in phrases like "engaged students really care about what they're learning; they want to learn, or engagement to me is passion and excitement. Interestingly, when we ask college students how they define engagement, many of their descriptions echo those of faculty, as they say things like: student engagement means feeling motivated, being challenged, excited about the new." Both teachers and students affirm the feeling aspect of engagement.

The etymological roots of the word engagement offer clues to this feeling aspect of student engagement. Engage is an Old French word for pledging one's life and honor as well as for charming or fascinating someone sufficiently that they become an ally. Both meanings resonate with teachers' emotion-based view of student engagement: we want students to share our enthusiasm for our academic discipline and find our courses so compelling that they willingly, in fact enthusiastically, devote their hearts and minds to the learning process.

The Glossary of Education Reform's (2016) definition supports the feeling or affective component of student engagement, as follows:

In education, student engagement refers to the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught, which extends to the level of motivation they have to learn and progress in their education. Generally speaking, the concept of student engagement is predicated on the belief that learning improves when students are inquisitive, interested, or inspired, and that learning tends to suffer when students are bored, dispassionate, disaffected, or otherwise disengaged. (para. 1)

A similar definition also suggests the feeling aspect of student engagement, describing such engagement as students' willingness, need, desire, and compulsion to participate in, and be successful in, the learning process (Bomia et al., 1997, p. 294). Much of the literature about engagement describes this factor of engagement as affective or emotional engagement (see, e.g., Fredericks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004). This feeling aspect of engagement relates to what the learner is thinking about in the classroom. It includes student feelings about the content or activity and also may involve something outside the classroom.

The feeling aspect of engagement at its most fundamental level boils down to motivation and whether students are motivated for learning in a particular course. The Latin derivative of motivation means to move. Brophy (2004) defines motivation in the classroom as the level of enthusiasm and the degree to which students invest attention and effort in learning (p. 4), which echoes many of the feeling definitions of student engagement. Motivation, then, is a theoretical construct to explain the reason or reasons we engage in a particular behavior. It is the feeling of interest or enthusiasm that makes somebody want to do something. In the classroom, we hope students will want to learn. Research demonstrates that motivation to learn is an acquired competence developed through an individual's cumulative experience with learning situations. It is a web of connected insights, skills, values, and dispositions that is developed over time (Brophy, 2004).

Some students come to our institutions and our classes with a high impetus to learn. Others are more motivated by the economic opportunities associated with the professions and careers they hope to have once they graduate. Regardless of a student's general disposition, motivation is also activated or suppressed in specific situations: even students who generally want to learn may be less enthusiastic in a course that they feel coerced to take because it is a required element of the general education curriculum. Conversely, students who seem generally unmotivated to learn may become quite enthusiastic about the concepts or ideas in a specific course.

The Thinking Aspect of Engagement

In addition to describing a feeling aspect to engagement, when we ask them for their definitions, college teachers also describe student engagement with phrases like engaged students are trying to make meaning of what they are learning or engaged students are involved in the academic task at hand and are using higher-order thinking skills, such as analyzing information or solving problems. They recognize that learning is a dynamic process that consists of making sense and meaning out of new information by connecting it to what is already known. Students likewise respond to questions about engagement with something along the lines of getting the student more involved in their own learning and becoming active learners. They too recognize the thinking aspect of engagement.

In the literature, the thinking aspect of student engagement has been described as 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 (Newmann, Wehlage, & Lamborn, 1992, p. 12). This thinking aspect is what is referred to in the literature as cognitive engagement (Appleton, Christenson, & Furlong, 2008; Fredericks et al., 2004; Marks, 2000; Reschly, Huebner, Appleton, & Antaramian, 2008; Skinner, Kindermann, & Furrer, 2009). This type of engagement focuses on student intellectual investment in the content, lesson, or activity.

What this intellectual effort and investment in learning boils down to is active learning. Bonwell and Eison (1991) neatly define active learning as doing what we think and thinking about what we are doing (p. iii). We distinguish between active learning, which consists of intellectual effort and deep processing, and active learning techniques. Active learning suggests that the mind is actively engaged. Its defining characteristics are that students are dynamic participants in their learning and that they are reflecting on and monitoring both the processes and the results of their learning. (Active learning techniques are instructional activities that help students achieve active learning.) As Cross (1998b) notes, a chess player may sit for hours without talking or moving, but with active mental engagement for studying the layout of the pieces and strategizing the next move. Highly skilled listeners who are involved in a lecture by self-questioning, analyzing, and incorporating new information into their existing knowledge are learning more actively than a student who is participating in a small group discussion that is off-task, redundant, or superfluous. It is this definition of active learning, where students take information or a concept and make it their own by connecting it to their existing knowledge and experience that is critical to student engagement. An engaged student actively examines, questions, and relates new ideas to old, thereby achieving the kind of deep learning that lasts. Active learning is fundamental to and underlies all aspects of student engagement.

A Model of Student Engagement

Whether teachers think primarily of the feeling or thinking elements of student engagement, they are quick to point out that both are required. A classroom filled with enthusiastic, motivated students is great, but it is educationally meaningless if it does not result in learning. Conversely, students who are learning but doing so reluctantly and resentfully are not engaged, and they are probably not learning to the extent that they could be.

Student engagement is a mental state that is the product of motivation and active learning. It is a product rather than a sum because it will not occur if either element is missing. It does not result from one or the other alone, but rather is generated in the space that resides at the overlap of motivation and active learning. Motivation and active learning work together synergistically, and as they interact, they contribute incrementally to increase engagement. From this perspective, rather than a Venn diagram that describes engagement as the overlap of active learning and motivation—thereby limiting the influence of each—engagement may be better described as a double helix in which active learning and motivation are spirals working together synergistically, building in intensity, and creating a fluid and dynamic phenomenon that is greater than the sum of their individual effects (see Figure 1.1).

Student engagement, then, is the mental state that results from the synergistic interaction between motivation and active learning. Thus, engagement occurs on a continuum: it starts at the intersection of motivation and active learning, but these two work synergistically and build in intensity. At the far end of the continuum are the transformative peak experiences that constitute the treasured milestones of an education. As attractive and appealing as these experiences are, they are not sustainable on a constant basis – that would be too exhausting for teachers and students. As college teachers, we can strive to increase instances of deep, authentic engagement, reduce the incidence of indifference and apathy that characterize disengagement, and attend to the many ways we can adapt our teaching methods to enhance engaged learning throughout the range in between.

Schematic illustration of Double Helix Model of Student Engagement.

FIGURE 1.1. Double Helix Model of Student Engagement

Source: U.S. National Library of Medicine (http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/basics/dna.html).

It's essential to remember, however, that what is motivating to one student may not be so to another. A fundamental characteristic of active learning is that students must connect what is being learned to what is already known, and what one student already knows is not the same as what is already known by another. Thus, the blend of motivating factors and active learning that promotes student engagement is unique to each individual learner. Acknowledging that engagement is referenced individually, excellent teachers who create engaging classes manage to find ways to challenge and support students at many different cognitive and developmental levels as well as create an affective environment that helps all students feel as though their presence and participation in the course matters, so that they will exert the effort necessary to learn.

Engaged Learning Behaviors

Some models of student engagement list behavior as a type of engagement. For example, Fredericks et al. (2004) suggest that there are three types of student engagement: cognitive, emotional, and behavioral. This perspective has a ring of truth to it since we know from experience that engaged students often exhibit different behaviors from their disengaged counterparts. We, however, don't view behaviors as a type of engagement but rather as the outcome of engagement. Thus, we believe that student engagement leads to some specific learning behaviors. For example, students who are motivated to learn and are actively engaging intellectual effort in their learning will likely attend class, pay attention, take notes, participate in the discussion, turn in assignments, and so forth. The mental state of engagement and the physical act of learning behaviors are thus connected, but we see it as a causal relationship rather than a separate factor or type of engagement.

In his description of different levels of engagement, Schlechty (2011) offers some insight into the connection between mental state and behaviors. In particular, he describes five ways that students might respond to a learning task that illustrate different levels of engagement along with associated feelings, thoughts, and learning behaviors:

Engagement (high attention–high commitment): Students see that the activity is personally meaningful. Likewise, the students feel that their goal is to get the activity right and perform well, with or without extrinsic motivation. Students attend to the tasks they are engaged in, and they persist in the face of difficulty.

Strategic compliance (high attention–low commitment): Students see the value of the work and find the activity as worth doing, but only because of grades, approval, and class rank. Students are primarily seeking teacher recognition and peer appreciation. If the reward is removed, the students abandon the task.

Ritual compliance (low attention–no commitment): Students set learning at a low level of priority and are working only for the sake of compliance and on meeting the minimum requirements. They do the work only to avoid negative consequences such as getting a failing grade or mark. Their prime desire is to avoid teachers' reprimands and peer conflict. They do the bare minimum required of them.

Retreatism/noncompliance (no attention–no commitment): Students are disengaged in the task and activity and are emotionally withdrawn. They do not participate in the task, and feel unable to do what is asked and expected of them. They find ways to avoid the task that don't call attention to themselves. Schlechty says they do nothing and bother no one and they are skilled at going to sleep with their eyes open (p. 21).

Rebellion (diverted attention-no commitment): Students develop a negative attitude. They actively choose not to do the task and sometimes encourage others to rebel. They may instead listen to music or play a video game rather than complete the assigned task (pp. 15–21).

These five engagement levels show the interconnection between what students think and feel and how they may respond in kind with their actions. Through outlining these levels of engagement, Schlechty not only provides insight into learning behaviors that may signal different levels of engagement but also illuminates many ways in which students may or may not engage.

We note, however, that not all students who are engaged exhibit the behaviors described here, and not all disengaged students exhibit the same feelings about their learning. There are many issues that students face today that affect their willingness and ability to come to class, pay attention, and so forth. For example, students who are on the spectrum may not make eye contact, but they may be actively processing the information from a lecture. In addition, lack of engaged behaviors may not signal a lack of desire to engage. Overly tired students may want to engage, and may have the affect needed, but they may be physically unable to engage cognitively. So, while learning behavior can signal engagement, we can't assume that we can see engagement; mental states are by definition difficult to see and measure.

Documented Outcomes of Student Engagement

Researchers have demonstrated that engaging students in the learning process is related to increases in their academic achievement. As Coates (2005) points out, the student engagement research often is concerned with the extent to which students are engaging in a range of educational activities that research has shown as likely to lead to high quality learning (p. 26). Several researchers have indeed documented that increased levels of student engagement are positively related to increased student learning (see, e.g., Carini, Kuh, & Klein, 2006; Kuh, Kinzie, Buckley, Bridges, & Hayek, 2007; Glanville & Wildhagen, 2007). Pascarella and Terenzini's (2005, 2016) systematic review of the literature, for example, finds that a substantial amount of both experimental and correlation evidence suggests that active student involvement in learning has a positive impact on the acquisition of course content (2005, p. 101). In addition to improved learning outcomes, student engagement has been linked to other aspects of academic achievement, such as improved retention and persistence (see, e.g., Cruce, Wolniak, Seifert, & Pascarella, 2006; Krause, 2005).

Moreover, student engagement has been shown to help all learners to succeed, and thus it has an important social justice function. As Kuh (2009) argues, Engagement has compensatory effects on grades and persistence for students who most need a boost to performance because they are not adequately prepared academically when they start college (p. 685). He goes on to state that engaging in educationally purposeful activities helps to level the playing field, especially for students from low-income family backgrounds and others who have been historically underserved (689). The evidence is clear, according to Harper and Quaye (2009), who similarly state:

We are persuaded by a large volume of empirical evidence that confirms that strategizing ways to increase the engagement of various student populations, especially those for whom engagement is known to be problematic, is a worthwhile endeavor. The gains and outcomes are too robust to leave to chance, and social justice is unlikely to ensue if some students come to enjoy the beneficial by-products of engagement but others do not. (p. 3)

Thus, the costs of not striving for engagement for all are simply too high. It is imperative to seek to engage all students in their learning.

While combined motivation and active learning promote basic student engagement and improve learning outcomes for all students, some teachers are pushing for even more: They want students to be truly transformed by their educational experiences. Although any learning, by definition, results in some level of change, transformative learning is deep and thorough change. Cranton (2006) defines transformative learning as a process by which previously uncritically assimilated assumptions, beliefs, values, and perspectives are questioned and thereby become more open, permeable, and better justified (p. vi). It requires learners to examine problematic frames of reference to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, reflective, and able to change and can be provoked by a single event … or it can take place gradually and cumulatively over time (p. 36).

Transformative learning occurs when students are challenged intensely, creating the kind of growth described by Perry's (1998) upper levels of intellectual and ethical development. In Perry's observations, most freshmen enter college as dualists, believing that there are clear, objective, right/wrong answers. One of the goals of a college education is to help students move beyond dualistic thinking to more complex stages as they learn to deal with uncertainty and relativism. As experiences challenge their thinking, students begin to see that truth is contextual and relative, and, since there is not a single correct answer, may think something along the lines of everyone has a right to their own opinion. Eventually they recognize that there may be multiple answers to a question, but not all answers are equal, and specific criteria such as empirical evidence and logical consistency can help them evaluate the usefulness and validity of knowledge claims.

In Perry's (1998) fourth and final stage, students come to recognize that they must make individual choices that require both objective analysis and personal values. As students' thinking matures to this level of sophistication, it is truly transformative. Interestingly, Bowen (2005) observes that students often resist teachers' attempts to promote transformative learning precisely because it necessarily threatens the student's current identity and worldview, and he cites a study at an elite liberal arts college revealing that the majority of students did not want to participate in a discussion until they felt well prepared to defend their already firmly held views (Trosset, 1998, in Bowen, 2005). Some teachers consider transformative learning to be an element of engaged learning, but it may not be so much a required element as much as the result of either sustained engagement or engagement that has achieved a higher level of personal intensity.

Can Teachers Actually Promote Student Engagement?

Engagement is something that the students do, and as such, it's easy to say that they either come willing and ready to invest in the work or they don't. But in truth, teachers can do much to promote positive attitudes toward learning and the level of effort and depth of processing achieved. Indeed, for teachers, this is part and parcel of the job. Instructors who seek to increase opportunities for student engagement help everyone more successfully achieve the course's learning objectives. Decades of research in higher education document the relationship between student engagement and learning outcomes, and these results have been collated and synthesized in meta-studies focused on the key factors of engagement.

Meta-Research on Motivation Interventions

Several researchers have affirmed the relationship between motivation and learning. In addition, they have shown that an instructor's intentional efforts toward promoting motivation can be effective. In a 2016 meta-analysis, for example, the authors reviewed research on intervention studies that were grounded in motivation theory, such as achievement emotions, achievement goals, attribution, expectancy-value, goal setting, implicit theories of intelligence (mindsets), interest, need for achievement, possible selves, self-affirmation, self-confrontation, self-determination, self-efficacy, social belongingness, and transformative experience. They examined studies from all educational levels, including 57 studies at the college/university/postsecondary level. They found that interventions were generally effective at improving motivation and increasing learning outcomes (Lazowski & Hulleman, 2016). Their research provides faculty with documentation that efforts toward enhancing motivation can improve engagement and learning outcomes.

Meta-Research on Active Learning Strategies

We have noted that active learning is something akin to intellectual effort or deep processing, and that active learning techniques are the particular tasks teachers use to promote active learning among students. Hundreds of studies have documented the benefits of active learning techniques or strategies on student learning outcomes, and several authors have written excellent research reviews of this work (see, e.g., Hake, 1998; Michael, 2006; Prince, 2004). Moreover, a widely publicized article by Freeman et al. (2014) compared student outcomes in lectures alone versus lectures combined with active learning strategies in undergraduate STEM courses through a meta-analysis of 225 studies. The researchers found that when instructors used active learning strategies in addition to their lectures, student exam scores increased significantly and student failure rates decreased significantly when compared to instructors who used lecture methods alone. This review also suggests that teachers can play a meaningful role in promoting student engagement and learning outcomes by incorporating active learning techniques.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have defined engagement as a mental state representing the intersection of motivation (the feeling aspect of engagement) and active learning (the thinking aspect of engagement). We have suggested that teachers can do much to promote motivation and active learning, and that when they do so, they can improve student engagement and ultimately student learning outcomes.

Understanding basic principles drawn from research and theory on motivation and active learning can offer insights into how to promote student engagement. Let us therefore explore the first element in our model of student engagement, student motivation, in greater depth.

Chapter 2

Engagement and Motivation

WE HAVE POSITED that student engagement is a product of motivation and active learning; in this section, our focus is on the motivation factor of the model. What is motivation and how does motivation work in the college classroom as an essential factor of student engagement? While these are important questions that many college teachers grapple with, unfortunately there's not an easy answer. There are, however, several different theories about what motivates individuals and how motivation happens. Understanding these theories broadly can help to inform our understanding of how to motivate students and ultimately engage them in their learning. We now turn our attention to unpacking the concept of motivation.

What Is Motivation?

In Chapter 1, we described motivation as a theoretical construct to explain the reason(s) we engage in a particular behavior. We suggested that motivation is the feeling of interest or enthusiasm that makes someone want to do something. At a fundamental level, then, motivation is the inclination to act in a way that satisfies certain conditions, such as wishes, desires, or goals. Motivation means attempting to optimize well-being, maximize pleasure, and minimize pain. While motivations can be biologically based factors that are often called drives, including constructs like hunger and thirst that are rooted in biological purposes, they can also be driven by social and psychological mechanisms.

Motivation that is driven by social and psychological factors comes in two types: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation arises from internal factors such as personal satisfaction, interest, or enjoyment. For students, if they are in college because they want to learn and want to become more educated, they are intrinsically motivated. Intrinsically motivated students will be motivated by autonomy, purpose, and excellence. Motivation can also be extrinsic, which means it arises from external factors. Extrinsically motivated students might do their work because they want good grades or they want high-paying jobs upon graduation, or perhaps they are just trying to satisfy their parents, not just because they want to learn.

While some scholars have found that implementing strategies that promote extrinsic motivation could decrease intrinsic motivation (see, e.g., Deci, 1971; Kohn, 1993/1999), these findings have been challenged (see, e.g., Cameron, 2001); thus we have yet to fully determine the relationship between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. What we can say is that most students seem motivated by a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic factors, and that mix can change over time. We can also say that while many of us might prefer students who were completely intrinsically motivated, we would also do well to recognize the reality of extrinsic motivation in our students' lives and to understand that this type of motivation can have a place in the college classroom.

Several theories of motivation exist, and these can aid our understanding of student motivation. Early theories of motivation suggested that rational thought and reason were the primary factors in human motivation. However, many now believe that motivation may not be entirely rational and instead may be rooted in basic instincts, needs, and wants. Two primary categories of motivation theory are particularly important to our current work:

Reviews for Student Engagement Techniques

[kcannon_26 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If I could recommend only one book on course transformation for the Blended Learning in Higher Education group to consider, I would choose this one. Barkley organizes the volume into three parts encompassing the full range of requirements for a faculty who wish to either augment or fully reformat the way that students interact in their courses. It is a blended book, focusing on student outcomes in general and includes numerous very specific techniques that can be translated to in person and online experiences. It's sophistication lies in the fact that it does not make the simplistic assumption that listening to a lecture is ALWAYS passive nor that participating in a group is ALWAYS active. It recognizes that a student's prior knowledge and cognitive attention can be aligned with the faculty learning designer's academic expectations in a thoughtfully-constructed activity. It assumes that unmeasurable components are essential to the success of the teaching and the learning, such as: passion, enthusiasm, and personality. In Part 1 conceptual frameworks are covered broadly enough to remind any experienced instructor of one or two favorite or forgotten frameworks. In Part 2, 50 strategies are succinctly inventoried. Again they are broadly arrayed and clearly labeled so that an experienced educator can quickly locate a few new ideas. Specific tips are included with each strategy. And finally, in Part 3, Barkley catalogs a diverse array of well-tested techniques for the classroom. These give enough detail for the learning designer to use them immediately or to develop their own script for the new activity.Best of all, she includes brief descriptions of how the activities can be transferred to an online format.