PROMOTING STUDENT ENGAGMENT IN THE CLASSROOM

One important predictor of student achievement is course engagement. Engagement is a multifaceted construct and includes 4 distinct dimensions: skills engagement, participation/interaction engagement, emotional engagement, and performance engagement. Handelsman and his colleagues (2005) developed a student course engagement questionnaire (SCEQ) to measure each of those dimensions. We administered the SCEQ to all students enrolled in psychology courses at UNK at the end of the Fall semester, 2006. The purpose of the study was to determine what types of courses and teaching styles were most likely to promote student engagement. The results indicated that there are many ways that instructors can promote course engagement including classroom structure (discussion classes), individuation (knowing student names and keeping class sizes small) and teacher support in the form of being responsive to student questions, encouraging students to seek assistance, and assigning effective aids to learning.

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