Engaging with engagement in learning chemistry: a guiding note about a multidimensional construct

Abstract

Student engagement in learning chemistry is arguably a central premise of chemistry education. Most teachers and researchers refer broadly to ‘engagement’ at some point during their work, usually as part of instructional design, reflective classroom practice, measurement of learning outcomes or a combination of these. In fact, as a multidimensional construct, learner engagement for any individual is observed to be fluid and malleable and hence is very difficult to capture. Many readers of our journal may seek to understand an author's position on engagement so that they can connect reported findings to their own contexts. To facilitate this process, in this Editorial article, I briefly visit the basis of the multiple facets of ‘engagement’ aiming to support authors in framing their work on learner engagement more explicitly. I encourage authors to establish and communicate their theoretical perspective and the methodological lens that they have applied in their chemistry education research and practice involving engagement.

Learner engagement is a complex and multifaceted construct

‘Engagement’ is often cited as a measure that has been observed to either increase or decrease across a defined period ranging from a single learning event (lesson or lecture) to an academic semester or year in a learning context. The perspective of ‘engagement’ that is adopted depends on the lens of the stakeholder who has endeavoured to measure and interpret the construct. For example, teachers and education researchers are focussed on whole classes of students or on individual learners; they explore learning approaches and academic outcomes. Institutional stakeholders typically consider the bigger picture of student engagement in terms of trends in recruitment, retention and attrition, or perhaps connectivity with their alumni.

It is important to recognise that an extensive body of research literature exists reporting different facets of engagement – it is not possible within the one or two pages of this Editorial note to attempt to provide a concise synthesis across this work! A recent literature review that reports on the status of the different perspectives of engagement reflects on the diversity of interpretations of the construct while recognising that substantial progress has been made in distilling and measuring different facets of the construct (Wong and Liem, 2022). A chemistry education researcher or practitioner who is just embarking on their journey into learner engagement, including different conceptual frameworks, is directed to several seminal works as an entry point into the multidimensionality of this construct. The work of Fredricks et al. (2004), that was informed by prior research, is recognised by many researchers as foundational for the proposition of the interactions between affective (also referred to as emotional), behavioural and cognitive dimensions of engagement. A brief synopsis of each dimension of engagement is listed below, informed by the above article and also by Sinatra et al. (2015), the latter having a focus in the domain of science education.

• Affective engagement: students’ emotional valence in their reactions to the learning environment, teachers, peers and academic subject areas.

• Behavioural engagement: the extent to which students intentionally exert effort during academic activities and tasks.

• Cognitive engagement: task-relevant thoughts applied involving concentration and willingness to exert the effort necessary to persist in understanding complex ideas and mastering difficult skills.

Agentic engagement has been proposed as a fourth dimension and considers the extent to which a student actively makes constructive and proactive contributions to their own processes of learning (Reeve and Tseng, 2011).

The above dimensions, including agentic engagement, are often referred to collectively as psychological perspectives of engagement. In the past decade, additional relationships between sociocultural factors, diversity and student identity with dimensions of the construct have been proposed to be important influences on student learning and achievement (Kahu, 2013).

Measures of learner engagement in chemistry education

Within a classroom environment, teachers are likely to informally evaluate their own students’ engagement through interactions and observations. Teacher monitoring is a skill that is taught in pre-service teacher preparation programs, but is further strengthened through iterative and reflective practice. Formal evaluation of student engagement requires that researchers define the dimension(s) of engagement that are under exploration, the object of engagement, and the method of measurement that is aligned to each dimension.

Sinatra et al. (2015) proposed a continuum of engagement measurement that can provide a useful starting point when planning a research study. Self-report instruments have been widely used in capturing evidence of cognitive engagement; originally their implementation was to explore and develop motivation theories, however, they have evolved into capturing different approaches to learning that are adopted by students (Greene, 2015). Deeper insights are possible when different sources of data are combined; many authors opt to collect self-report data then triangulate this with other forms of measurement data, such as time on task, quantifying interactions with resources and interviews (Sinatra et al., 2015).

In recent years, we have seen an increase in the number of chemistry education research articles that have combined different sources of measurements to explore the multiple dimensions of engagement in relation to learning activities (tasks, actions and experiences) or resources. In this current issue of Chemistry Education Research and Practice, readers can find one such example of a study where the authors define four dimensions of engagement, including social engagement, that they consider important in small-group active learning (Nennig et al., 2023). Their methods of measurement include data collection that captures student interaction discourse moves and student-expressed chemical thinking. Readers can also search chemistry education journals to find further studies that explore multiple dimensions of engagement in different chemistry learning environments, for example, active learning (Naibert and Barbera, 2022) and laboratory learning (Smith and Alonso, 2020).

Final thoughts

From my perspective, chemistry education research is situated at a nexus at which discipline-based education, educational psychology, cognitive science and instructional design all intersect. I recommend reading widely across boundaries in education research to facilitate the transfer of important knowledge and research practices into chemistry education contexts. The multidimensional construct of engagement demands this broader consultation with education and psychology research literature to consider how we can best support student learning. I recommend authors dig a little further and explicitly communicate how they conceptualise and measure the dimensions of the construct of engagement – hopefully the result is a deeper engagement with engagement!

References

1. Fredricks J. A., Blumenfeld P. C. and Paris A. H., (2004), School engagement: Potential of the concept, state of the evidence, Rev. Educ. Res., 74(1), 59–109.
2. Greene B. A., (2015), Measuring cognitive engagement with self-report scales: Reflections from over 20 years of research, Educ. Psych., 50(1), 14–30.
3. Kahu E. R., (2013), Framing student engagement in higher education, Stud. High. Educ., 38(5), 758–773.
4. Naibert N. and Barbera J., (2022), Development and Evaluation of a Survey to Measure Student Engagement at the Activity Level in General Chemistry, J. Chem. Educ., 99(3), 1410–1419.
5. Nennig H. T., States N. E., Macrie-Shuck M., Fateh S., Kirbulut Gunes Z. D., Cole R., Rushton G. T., Shah L. and Talanquer V., (2023), Chem. Educ. Res. Pract., 24(3) 10.1039/D3RP00071K.
6. Reeve J. and Tseng C. M., (2011), Agency as a fourth aspect of students’ engagement during learning activities, Contemp. Educ. Psychol., 36(4), 257–267.
7. Sinatra G. M., Heddy B. C. and Lombardi D., (2015), The challenges of defining and measuring student engagement in science, Educ. Psych., 50(1), 1–13.
8. Smith K. C. and Alonso V., (2020), Measuring student engagement in the undergraduate general chemistry laboratory, Chem. Educ. Res. Pract., 21(1), 399–411.
9. Wong Z. Y. and Liem G. A. D., (2022), Student engagement: Current state of the construct, conceptual refinement, and future research directions, Educ. Psych. Rev., 107–138.

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