Instructional Discourse, Student Engagement, and Literature Achievement

TLDR

Student engagement is commonly divided into procedural engagement, which focuses on classroom rules, and substantive engagement, which involves sustained commitment to content and is characterized by reciprocal interaction between students and teachers. The study investigates how different instructional practices promote engagement with literature and examines the impact of these engagement types on student achievement. Using data from 58 eighth‑grade English classes, the authors describe the manifestations of procedural and substantive engagement, propose empirical hypotheses, and identify features of substantively engaging instruction such as authentic questions, uptake of prior responses, and high‑level teacher evaluation. Results confirm that disengagement harms achievement, procedural engagement has a weak relationship with achievement, and substantive engagement strongly and positively predicts achievement.

Abstract

This article examines the kinds of instruction that foster student engagement with literature and the effects of such instruction on achievement. First, two general kinds of student engagement are distinguished: “procedural,” which concerns classroom rules and regulations, and “substantive,” which involves sustained commitment to the content and issues of academic study. The article then describes the manifestations of these two forms of engagement, explains how they relate differently to student outcomes, and offers some empirical propositions using data on literature instruction from 58 eighth-grade English classes. The results provide support for three hypotheses: (a) Disengagement adversely affects achievement; (b) Procedural engagement has an attenuated relationship to achievement because its observable indicators conflate procedural and substantive engagement; and (c) Substantive engagement has a strong, positive effect on achievement. Features of substantively engaging instruction include authentic questions, or questions which have no prespecified answers; uptake, or the incorporation of previous answers into subsequent questions; and high-level teacher evaluation, or teacher certification and incorporation of student responses into subsequent discussion. Each of these is noteworthy because they all involve reciprocal interaction and negotiation between students and teachers, which is said to be the hallmark of substantive engagement.