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38 Change January/February 2011

ENGAGEMENTBy Rick D. Axelson and Arend Flick

F

ew terms in the lexicon o higher education today are in-voked more requently, and in more varied ways, than en-

gagement. None (except perhaps unding) is employed

more oten to describe what institutions want to generate

more o. The phrase student engagement has come toreer to how involvedorinterestedstudents appear to be in their learn-

ing and how connectedthey are to their classes, their institutions, andeach other. As measured by such instruments as the National Survey

o Student Engagement (NSSE) or the College Student Experiences

Questionnaire (CSEQ), the level o student engagement at a particularcollege or university is increasingly seen as a valid indicator o insti-

tutional excellence, more meaningul than such traditional (and more

easily measured) characteristics as the number o books in the collegelibrary or Nobel laureates on the aculty.

And these days, its not just students whose engagement is desired

(or whose disengagement is deplored). The concept has inserted it-sel, meme-like, into the vernacular o an over-stimulated, easily bored

culture, with moody baseball players described by sportscasters as

unexpectedly engaged in games in which they play well. Even USPresidents are attacked by their critics or being insuciently engaged.

The high cost o disengaged employees is the topic o a recent Gallup

Institute study; the goal o much amily therapy has become sustainingengagement among amily members.

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Rick D. Axelson is an assistant pro-

essor and aculty consultant or the

Ofce o Consultation and Research

in Medical Education (OCRME) at

the University o Iowa. Prior to join-

ing OCRME in 2007, he served as the

assistant vice provost or institutional

research, assessment, and planning

at the University o Missouri-Kansas

City, where he worked with aca-

demic departments on enhancing

their program review and assessment

processes. Arend Flick is a proessor

o English and aculty development

coordinator at Norco College (CA).

He has also served as assessment

coordinator or the Riverside (CA)

Community College district and has

consulted with a number o collegesand universities on the assessment o

student learning.

www.changemag.org 39

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Why should engagement be so serious an issue today, par-

ticularly in our colleges and universities? Is it really possible to

measure accurately (not to mention strengthen) the dispositions

or connections to which the term student engagement reers?

And what do we mean by the term in the rst place?

The hisToryof engagemenT

Etymologically speaking, the wordengagementhas the in-

teresting history that 500-year-old English words originating

in France oten do. To engage onesel meant to mortgage

ones lands long beore it meant agreeing ormally to something

(marriage, or example), but either way it was serious business,

indicating that one was exposing onesel to risk, oering one-

sel as a guarantor o something promised. The Norman root

word,gage, rom which engagement derives, means pledge

as in tying onesel to a course o action by oath. For hundreds

o years, an engagement was a moral, oten legal, obligation.

As the word evolved, though, the orce o the commitment

sotened. Only airly recently has engage come to mean, more

mildly, to occupy the attention o, with engagement the condi-

tion or act o being so occupied. Today, then, we are engaged

when we are entirelypresentand not somewhere else.

Depending on how its lineage is traced, the history o stu-

dent engagement as a concept is anywhere rom ten to 70 years

old. The educational psychologist Ralph Tyler did research

in the 1930s, rst at Ohio State and later at the University o

Chicago, on how much time students spent on their work and

tried to show its eects on learning. Later, C. Robert Paces re-

search on quality o eort in the 1960s led to the development

o the CSEQ, rst administered in 1979.Many historians o education would agree, however, that

Alexander Astins student involvement research in the 1980s

deserves credit or originating what would eventually become

modern engagement research. Astin suggested that a students

involvement (the quantity and quality o physical and psycho-

logical energy that students invest in the college experience)

produces learning in direct proportion to that involvement.

While not all educational theorists agree that involvement and

engagement are the same thing, Astin recently indicated that he

sees no essential dierences between the terms, and ormer

NSSE director at the University o Indiana George Kuh told a

recent interviewer that the concepts are temporal representa-tions o pretty much the same thing.

The naTional surveyof sTudenT engagemenT

In the late 1980s, in an educational climate heavily infu-

enced by the dystopian rhetoric oA Nation at Risk, as well

as an emerging conviction among educational theorists that

student learning is ostered more by processes than by student

demographics, Peter Ewell o the National Center or Higher

Education Management Systems was asked to develop an

instrument to assess the extent to which students take part in

empirically derived good educational practices and what they

gain rom their college experience. Under the auspices o the

Pew Charitable Trusts and the National Center or Educational

Statistics, Ewell gathered a team to design this instrument; thus,

in 1999 the NSSE was born. It was administered to students at

140 institutions in the rst year; more than ve times that num-

ber participated in 2008.

The NSSE measures student behaviors highly correlated

with many desirable learning and personal development out-

comes o college. These behaviors include such standard col-

lege experiences as aculty-student contact, participation in

collaborative learning experiences, and number o hours spent

per week on homework. Besides student behaviors, the survey

assesses institutional eatures thought to correlate with learn-

ing, such as a supportive campus environment.The NSSE allows institutions to benchmark their students

aggregate scores in a host o areas against similar institutions

as a way o probing or areas needing improvement. Its no ex-

aggeration to say o the NSSE that most college teachers and

administrators automatically think o it (or its two-year col-

lege counterpart, the Community College Survey o Student

Engagement) whenever they hear the term student engage-

ment.

What exactly, though, is meant by that term? And what is its

relationship to student learning? Following up on Astins em-

phasis on involvement, Kuh argues that the engagement prem-

ise is straightorward and easily understood: the more students

study a subject, the more they know about it. He has elsewheredened engagement as the extent to which [students] take part

in educationally eective practices, which enlarges the term

to include activities besides studyingespecially time spent in

consultation with instructors.

The NSSEs denition o engagement suggests that engage-

ment is largely a matter obehavior on the part o students,

something students can be observed doing. (Astin, remember,

had suggested that involvement was as much a psychological as

a physical phenomenon.) The NSSE determines how much time

students spend engaged in educationally eective practices

by asking them to estimate their levels o involvement in these

activities over the past year.

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formsof engagemenT

One o the problems with such a denition, however, is that

it may minimize the importance o less easily observed orms

o engagement in the cognitive and emotional realms. Some

students, we know, may show outward signs o engagement butactually be mostly detached; some may be deeply curious about

their coursework or psychologically invested in it but, or what-

ever reasons, display ew or none o the behavioral traits we

associate with engagement.

Behavioral engagement is oten implicitly seen as a proxy or

emotional and cognitive engagement (not to mention a proxy

or learning itsel). But it may not be, or not as universally as is

sometimes supposed. The biologist Robert Leamnson notes that

students interest in a task is clearly important. Nevertheless,

it does not guarantee that students will acquire the kinds o

knowledge that will support new learning.

Other critics o the student engagement concept have some-times suggested that we do damage to the messy reality o stu-

dent learning i we disaggregate the various orms o engage-

ment rom each other, or valorize one o its orms above the

other. Some say that student engagement is best understood as a

multidimensional construct or metaconstruct.

But there has been little eort to study how the three sorts o

engagementbehavioral, emotional, and cognitiveinterre-

late, or which (i any) could be said to have the primary role in

producing learning. This is to say nothing o the complications

involved in sorting out how levels, kinds, and results o engage-

ment might dier rom student subgroup to subgroup.

Denitions o student engagement are oten tangled se-

mantically as well as conceptually. One researcher has said oengagement that it is an important means by which students

develop eelings about their peers, proessors, and institutions

that give them a sense o connectedness, aliation, and belong-

ing, while simultaneously oering rich opportunities or learn-

ing and development. I this is so, then engagement comes

rst, leading to a set o emotions (eelings) that then produces

connectedness. But isnt connectedness a synonym or en-

gagement in the rst place?

Engagement is viewed by another theorist as a concept

that could provide a way to ameliorate . . . the high levels

o student boredom. This is like saying that good health

ameliorates illness. (The same authors go on to assert thatengagement is an antidote to . . . student alienation, another

unhelpul tautology.) It is no wonder that they conclude that

the concept o engagement is theoretically messy, sometimes

overlap[ping] with other constructs, sometimes . . . simply

substitut[ing] dierent terminology or the same constructs.

(The same charge could be made about other popular terms in

education today: e.g., assessment, critical thinking, andaca-

demic reedom.)

ClarifyingTheTerm

To sharpen the meaning ostudent engagement, we begin by

noting a undamental confict between two uses o the term: 1)

as an accountability measure that provides a general index o

students involvement with their learning environments; and

2) as a variable in educational research that is aimed at under-

standing, explaining, and predicting student behavior in learn-

ing environments.An expansive denition suits the purposes o accountability

by consolidating several institutional and student variables into

a single measure or index o engagement. However, or use in

research and program improvement, it obscures some o the

very phenomena and relationships we seek to study (i.e., the

various types o engagement and their linkages with learning

tasks and learning environments); it makes it dicult to dene

and measure specic instances o engagement and consequently

precludes study o the actors that inhibit and enhance it.

To support the research and program improvement uses o

student engagement, we believe that a narrower denition o

the term is needed, one that is restricted to students level o

involvement in a learning process. Also, to gain the type o in-

ormation needed or program improvement purposes, we need

to ask more specic questions about student engagement.

At a minimum, we could rene engagement questions by in-

cluding specic learning goals, learning contexts, types o stu-

dents, and the processes through which they become engaged.

That is, we might ask, How do we engage (cognitively, behav-

iorally, and/or emotionally) type Xstudents most eectively

in type Ylearning processes/contexts so that they will attain

knowledge, skill, or disposition Z?

In 1994, Terenzini et al. observed a similar need or specic-

ity in earlier research regarding the student-learning context

connectioni.e., involvement and academic and social in-tegration (c. Tinto 1993). They noted that there was extensive

evidence about the positive impacts o student involvement

in college but little understanding o the personal and organi-

zational processes and mechanisms that bring it about. This

observation remains true today. More rened usage o engage-

ment would enable us to raise, sharpen, and more eectively

address some o the more undamental questions implicit in the

attempts to expand the denition and use o this concept.

Here are two such questions.

Whos Responsible?

I engagement is equated with the time a student spends in

educationally eective practices, we should naturally want to doall we can to bring about more o it. But who is responsible or

creating and sustaining high levels o student engagement? The

institution has been consigned an increasingly large measure o

this responsibility.

Another o Kuhs denitions parcels out that responsibility

when he suggests that student engagement represents both

the time and energy students invest in educationally purpose-

ul activities and the eort institutions devote to using eective

educational practices (emphasis added). He has also said that

engagement involves aspects o student behaviorand institu-

tional perormance that colleges and universities can do some-

thing about (emphasis added). Engagement, in these expanded

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understood relationship, it is oten assumed that engagement is

causally related to learning. But the relationship between en-

gagement and learning is ar rom clear. Some highly engaged

students learn almost nothing, simply because the classes they

take are so poorly designed or incompetently taught that little oconsequence happens in them.

As has been widely reported, measures o engagement

are reliable correlates o such desirable student

outcomes as higher grades among rst-year

students and college persistence. Yet the

causal ordering, i any, among engage-

ment, learning, and student outcomes is

unclear.

Engagement may simply be the

byproduct o a learning environ-

ment that suits the student. I this

were true, the observed correlations

among the dependent variables o en-

gagement, learning, and other student

outcomes (e.g., grades and graduation

rates) would result rom their sharing

a common set o determinants (learning

environment design eatures). Or, alterna-

tively, perhaps the mysterious and little-un-

derstood motivational (and cognitive) actors

that lead some students to more visible mani-

estations o engagement are themselves more

directly responsible or learning than engagement

is. In either o the above scenarios, an intervention

at the node we call engagement would probablynot produce the educational outcomes we desire.

Many educational theorists assume a causal re-

lationship they havent really proved between what

John Bransord and his colleagues call cognitive

denitions, is not simply a measure o how involved students

are in their learning; it is also an indication o how involving

institutions are or their students.

Clearly, students and institutions each have responsibilities

or the quality o student learning. Students need to put orththe eort necessary to develop their knowledge and skills, and

institutions need to provide the appropriate environments to

acilitate student learning. Indeed, this later point is

especially important or countering the earlier

over-emphasis on student attributes and

behaviors as the source o engagement

ailures.

But the term gets uzzy when we

conuse student engagement with the

institutional characteristics that are

thought to bring it about. Colleges

and universitiesand especially the

proessors in whose classrooms stu-

dents nd themselvesclearly have a

large role to play in ostering student

engagement. But to speak o engage-

ment as an aspect o institutional per-

ormance or how the institution deploys

its resources is a semantic imprecision that

hinders analytic uses o the concept.

Trying to encapsulate the two sets o respon-

sibilities within the concept o engagement only

serves to obscure the issues we need to address.

It confates the dependent variable (i.e., student

engagement) with independent variables (i.e., ea-tures o the learning environment) and introduces

an implicit explanation or engagement ailures: at

least one o the parties (students, institutions) is not

living up to its responsibilities.

The long-standing arguments about who is respon-

sible or educational ailures demonstrate that there is

no shortage o ready culprits, ranging rom underprepared

and unmotivated students to ineective pedagogies and instruc-

tors to a culture that devalues education. There is also no end

in sight to this debate, and no practical solutions are likely to

emerge rom this line o questioning.

But i we dene engagement in the more limited sensei.e.,

student involvement in a learning processwe can move pastthe issue o who is responsible to a more productive question:

What are the actors aecting student engagement in a particu-

lar type o learning process? This could lead to less politically

charged, more locally based, eorts to identiy and eliminate

barriers to student engagement in classrooms and educational

programs.

What is the Relationship Between Engagement and

Learning?

Whether engagement is seen primarily in emotional, cogni-

tive, or behavioral terms or as a metaconcept comprising all

three o these dispositions in some complex, as yet unclearly

Students and institutions each

have responsibilities for the qual-

ity of learning. Students need to

put forth the effort necessary to

develop their knowledge and skills,

and institutions need to provide

the appropriate environments to

facilitate student learning.

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competence (i.e., learning) and motivational actors, perhaps

because it is so dicult to control or all the variables in such a

way as to produce more persuasive evidence o causality. And

there is the even more complex problem o what we mean by

learning. Bransord et al. useully distinguish between learn-ing-oriented students, who value education or its intrinsic

worth, and perormance-oriented students, who may be more

preoccupied with grades. It may be that certain orms o behav-

ioral engagement lead only to achievement-related outcomes,

not to the deeper orms o learning we value most.

nexT sTeps

We do know a great deal about student engagement that

matters or learning and that we can build on. We know, or at

least have reason to believe, that it is better or a student to be

engagedeven behaviorally engaged, as revealed by the NSSE

indicatorsthan not to be. We know, or have reason to suspect,

that many o the deeply embedded, rarely interrogated struc-

tures o American higher education today may actually contrib-

ute to, rather than meliorate, the disengagement problem.

Do we really consider the ollowing a recipe or engagement:

15-week courses meeting or two hours twice a week with

one proessor, ocused on a discrete but arbitrary subject upon

which students are examined in a high-stakes nal exam? Does

our notionand deliveryo general education ollow such a

recipe? Our majors?

n Bransord, J., Brown, A., & Cocking, R. (2000).How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington,DC: National Academy Press.

n Fredricks, J.A., Blumeneld, P.C., & Paris, A.H. (2004). School engagement: Potential o the concept, state o theevidence.Review o Educational Research, 74, 59109.

n Friedlander, M.L., Heatherington, L., Johnson, B., & Skowron, E.A. (1994). Sustaining engagement: A change event inamily therapy,Journal o Counseling Psychology, 41, 438448.

n Gonyea, R., & Kuh, G. (2009). Using NSSE in institutional research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.n Harper, S., & Quaye, S. (2009). Student engagement in higher education: Theoretical perspectives and practicalapproaches or diverse populations. New York, NY: Routledge.

n Leamson, R. (1999). Thinking about teaching and learning: Developing habits o learning with frst-year college anduniversity students. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

n Pascarella, E., & Terenzini, P. (2005).How college aects students: A third decade o research (Vol. 2). San Francisco,CA: Jossey-Bass.

n Terenzini, P.T., Rendn, L.I., Upcrat, M.L., Millar, S.B., Allsion, K.W., Gregg, P.L. and Jalomo, R. (1994). The transitionto college: Diverse students, diverse stories.Research in Higher Education, 35, 5774.

n Tinto, V. (1993).Leaving college: Rethinking the causes and cures o student attrition, 2ndedition. Chicago, IL:University o Chicago Press.

n Wol-Wendel, L., Ward, K., & Kinzie, J. (2009). A tangled web o terms: The overlap and unique contribution o involve-ment, engagement, and integration to understanding college student success. Journal o College Student Development, 50,

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Resources

We know that classroom teachers have enormous power

over their students or good or illthat a powerully engaging

instructor o botany can turn 30 botany-hating students into bot-

any lover/learners (and the opposite is true as well). We know

that students disengage when tasks become either too easy ortoo complex and that some students are engaged in one class

but not in others. And we know that some student subgroups

seem to benet rom engagement more than others, even i the

benet cannot unequivocally be seen as increased learning.

But there is a great deal that we dont knowor worse, that

we think we know but may be wrong about. We badly need more

research on the interaction between engagement and learning

[Editors note: see the article by Ernest Pascarella et al. in the

January/February 2010 issue oChange or such a study] and on

the precise relationships among the various types o engagement

and their relationships to the learning that matters most to us.

We need to know more about why some students, and some

subgroups o students, disengage under certain circumstances

and what to do to prevent that rom happening.

We need to test more o our assumptions and dene and use

our terms with greater precision. The current denitions o en-

gagement are too abstract, the relationship between engagement

and learning too poorly understood, to ully guide us. In short,

we need to make educational engagement narrower and clearer,

and we need to nd more rened and practical ways to evaluate

engagement in higher education. C

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