Will These Trees Ever Bear Fruit?: A Response to the Special Issue on Student Engagement

Abstract

The authors articulate objections to the organization of the recent special issue on student engagement and respond in detail to three criticisms leveled in that issue. Situating their response relative to longstanding calls to make research more relevant to practice, they argue that the validity critique inappropriately focuses on criterion validity and rests on unwarranted generalizations and conjecture. The critique regarding the omission of intercultural effort rests upon misapprehensions of both the concept of student engagement and the actual content of the targeted surveys. And single-institution tests of benchmarks of effective educational practice improperly assume that the benchmarks represent latent constructs.