Understanding student behavioral engagement: Importance of student interaction with peers and teachers

Abstract

Recent theoretical conceptualizations of student engagement have raised questions about how to measure student engagement and how engagement varies not only across schools, but also within school and within classrooms. The authors build on existing research on student behavioral engagement and extend this research to emphasize a continuum of disengagement, active engagement, and passive engagement. They review common approaches to measuring engagement and highlight areas where new theoretical conceptualizations of engagement require new approaches to measurement. The authors analyze how student behavioral engagement changed depending on the context and demonstrate the need of a finer scale of engagement. They find there was not a uniform association of higher behavioral engagement and student interaction with peers, but it was the interaction with other students and the teacher that was predictive of increased engagement. Their work suggests that disaggregating behavioral engagement into disengagement, active engagement, and passive engagement has important research and conceptual implications.