Importance of Student Engagement in the Classroom Essay Sample

IMPORTANCE OF STUDENT ENGAGEMENT IN THE CLASSROOM
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Importance of Student Engagement in the Classroom
Introduction
Student engagement is a concept that helps in increasing the level of student satisfaction alongside enhancing their level of motivation towards learning, therefore, helping reduce the sense of isolation. Such an aspect is crucial when it comes to improving student performance in a classroom setup. It is, therefore, important to consider engagement as crucial towards student learning alongside satisfaction with various subjects. In this study, student engagement is used to refer to "the student's psychological investment and the strive towards understanding the various form of knowledge or skills alongside crafts that is promoted by academic engagement" (Student Engagement, 2014).
The aspect of student engagement proves influential when it comes to learning alongside teaching research according to the theory of involvement. Further, the synthesis of student engagement research provides, over time, unique evidence as per the concepts that work in classroom learning (Wimpenny and Savin-Baden, 2013; Trowler, 2010). These and other like reviews samples numerous studies concerning engagement. For instance, Wimpenny and Savin-Baden (2013) draw on over 2500 items for qualitative research purposes as per their project, Trowler (2010) utilized over 1,000 items in a review that never included qualitative alongside grey literature. Despite such enormous research, there is still a lack of consensus on understanding student classroom engagement's various aspects. This paper aims to investigate ways of increasing student focus in the English classroom by finding strategies applicable in increasing student engagement. The aim focuses on understanding the importance of student engagement and how to increase student focus within the classroom. The study also explores research to identify the various strategies required to increase student engagement (Zepke, 2019).
This thesis came from personal experience as well as exploration of research following recent encounters as a trainee teacher. Reflecting on personal experience, there exists a lack of focus and engagement amongst and between peers during schooling. This begs the question of the existence of such kind of disengagement and lack of focus within the classroom setup. There are tendencies of students losing concentration during the sessions in applying traditional teaching methods. In this case, there is a need for more interactive learning sessions, including a pedagogy capable of increasing students' mental focus.
The students' efforts and quality of teaching alongside institutional support all contribute towards student engagement in the classroom (Bryson, 2016). The engagement aspect focuses on behaviors that define various student efforts towards set educational activities, including the nature of support provided by their teachers within the classroom environment. However, such a widely accepted level of engagement attracts some level of controversy from researchers who prefer a more holistic and inclusive meaning. For instance, Sinatra et al. (2015) propose cognitive, emotional, and agentic dimensions on top of the behavioral. Some authors, such as Wimpenny and Savin-Baden (2013), assert that relationships both inside and outside the classroom provide key engagement factors.
Further, Kahu and Nelson (2017) argue that the learning process usually occurs within the psychological spaces referred to as the educational interfaces. In this case, the process of student engagement is ensured through positive alongside negative structural as well as psychological influences. Some of the psychological effects include satisfaction, well-being, and citizenship alongside personal growth. The student engagement is also synthesized by using a social-cultural, ecological lens capable of tracing various student, institution, and teacher influences, including external environment influence. Such provides a holistic understanding concerning the level of connections and engagements between classroom and education process, alongside engagement with various subjects (Lawson and Lawson, 2013).
Research questions
* How can I increase the student's focus in the classroom?
* What are the strategies to increase student engagement?
Literature Review
Anderman and Patrick (2012) assert that a student's emotional attachment provides one of the key factors in engagement. This also includes the roles that institutional alongside cultural structures play in influencing the students' relationship with their teachers within the classroom. Martin and Boliger (2018) assert that the aspect of engagement helps play an important role, especially when it comes to the stimulation of key roles in the classroom or online learning. The process involving student interaction with content and their peers alongside teachers helps my teaching practice on how to provide the necessary support system that ensures students become active and more engaged within their subject lines. In this case, the sense of community through interactions is sure to influence high-quality instruction alongside facilitating quality learning outcomes.
From the constructivist perspective, education focuses on students' ability to construct their knowledge underpinning the existing engagement research (Kahu and Nelson, 2017). Such a perspective operates under the assumption that students can be their learning agents capable of achieving various personal objectives. In such a case, the first perspective focuses on the agentic, constructivist learner. The research conducted by Lindblom-Ylänne et al. (2017) revealed that motivation and willingness to perform provide one of the most important explanatory factors determining whether learners engage or refuse to. Other researches provide a contrary opinion on what really motivates learners' engagement. Some literature investigates the impact of personality on engagement; the influence of various factors such as extroversion, perfectionism, intrinsic interest alongside knowledge acquisition, and future orientation (Kahu et al., 2017). However, the outcome of such studies often proves to be inconclusive. For instance, Seligman (2018) asserts that the concept of non-compulsive perfectionism assisted the aspect of motivation alongside engagement, in which case, forced perfectionism could easily result in burnout. However, in some positive contributions to literature, extroversion was found to positively influence the level of student participation alongside engagement since it provides an opportunity for face-to-face situations (Kahu et al., 2017).
According to Kinsella et al. (2017), there are two dimensions of personal preference that influence emotions, attitude alongside student level of engagement in the classroom. Firstly, the learning methodologies that emphasize a thorough understanding of the phenomenon influences level of engagement. Secondly, focus on a defined future provides an important influencer towards student's academic engagement. Notably, individuals that stick to their self-belief as capable of motivating themselves towards achievement. In this case, those working from fixed self-theories tend to operate and trust their personal abilities, therefore, adopting goals for their learning and easily lose motivation in the lack of evident achievement.
Such practices and scenarios can be very instrumental in teaching practice, especially when it comes to the development of different means that can easily necessitate proactive management of student engagement. In this case, the outlined practices would ensure significant reinforcement as well as improvement in classrooms' support that is required from instructors.
Franklin and Harrington (2019) conducted research on student engagement, and the results were that learners are more likely to engage in classwork on the condition that their instructors/teachers engage them with the teaching materials. The idea in such a scenario will be of help in my teaching practice case since I would emphasize the aspect of teacher-student relationship. This would ensure that teachers would provide necessary concern towards students through the cultivation and establishment of positive relationships. This is since the nature of the relationship between a teacher, and a student determines the extent to which a student can engage in classroom lessons (Zepke, 2019).
Importance of student engagement
The aspect of psychological disengagement is always facilitated through the contact that students have with the environment (Franklin and Harrington, 2019). The transition process through various grades is critical since the periods are characterized by a high level of learner disengagement in the classroom. However, the identified risk factors that may contribute to a high level of disengagement include: being in the minority group, poor upbringing, background, learners achieving low test scores, disciplinary issues, and a highly populated school environment.
Assessment of student engagement entails various factors that encompass family and community relationships, intrinsic and extrinsic influences, expectations, nature of assistance from seniors, and other environmental factors (Kinsella et al., 2017). There are different instruments applicable in assessing student engagement, with the identified instruments targeting different characteristics of engagement. Some of the instruments may include but are not limited to teacher reports, student self-assessment reports alongside observational measures. Understanding the limit of every instrument helps in appropriate measuring of multidimensional characteristics of student engagement. Some of the multidimensional aspects include emotional, behavioral as well as cognitive engagement. The instruments serve to identify motivational alongside the cognitive theory of learning, identify aspects of disengagement and dropout issues, evaluate the process of school intervention measures, and engage monitoring at every level and environment, including homes where students come from.
Methodology
A collection of 200 studies on student engagement was identified, published since 2012, whereby the study synthesized 70. The focus was the identification of relevant themes that currently inform the construct of the study. This study assumed a critical interpretative synthesis methodology (CIS) informed by the qualitative grounded theory that helped in the drawing of the conceptual framework with three identified higher-order themes (Zepke, 2019).
The keyword search for this study, "student engagement," identified a number of articles, reports, books, and grey literature published between 2015 and 2020 on the Web of Science, Google Scholar, PsycINFO, alongside Academic Search Elite. All the articles were queried for the existence of emergent themes alongside catalysts for action within diverse educational interfaces. In sampling the identified themes, the research reveals that the level of understanding of student engagement portrays some level of similarities and differences. In this case, some of the similarities entail an understanding that the level of student engagement revolves around learning, with cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and ecological aspects (Zepke, 2019).
The critical interpretative synthesis (CIS), a qualitative approach, provided the primary methodology applicable in the process of synthesizing themes and catalysts for action from the various engagement literature. The CIS approach applies the use of an iterative approach that frames the research question, develops categories, concepts and identifies the recurring themes. The methodology proves useful in the generation of theory by developing a synthesized argument from the identified literature using constant theoretical sampling. The synthesized argument aspect makes it easier for the researcher to develop a conceptual framework that comprises connected constructs.
The articles included in this study's synthesis were obtained from a range of literature that entails learning and teaching, positive psychology alongside critical pedagogy. In this study, the primary inclusion/exclusion criterion entails the relevance to the topic on student engagement alongside the various subsets of the major themes such as; emotional, cognitive, and behavioral alongside self-governing engagement. The articles were read, and recurring categories identified various concepts and themes that proved crucial in providing an explanation of the phenomenon of student engagement. The identified themes were compared to new findings alongside ideas in the literature and often changed whenever necessary. The CIS methodology was eff...