Engagement is a term that is ubiquitous in communications about classroom pedagogy, but it is not often well defined. Self-evident as it may seem, the concept of engagement is more complex than the interaction between student and course content. Attempts at defining engagement are additionally complicated by the ways in which students can often perceive engagement differently from faculty and instructional designers. This ambiguity surrounding the definition of engagement can have implications beyond academic disagreement, leading to mismatched expectations or misinterpreted communications.
When examining the literature surrounding engagement, there does not appear to be a single unified definition of what constitutes engagement. According to the meta-analysis conducted by Qian Wang of Yunnan Normal University, researchers tend to make one of three different claims about what engagement is. The first concludes that engagement is the level of connection students have with the material based on their levels of mastery and feedback from the instructor. Another group tends to describe engagement similar to a flow state, describing how students “join in the learning state” both inside and outside the classroom. There are others that posit that engagement is a multifactorial process, operating on behavioral, cognitive, and emotional levels. The behavioral refers to student actions like participation, effort, and attention, cognitive refers to self-regulated learning, deep learning techniques, and emotional refers to the effects related to student reactions to instructor feedback, their sense of belonging and identification with the course material (Fredricks). Additionally, research points towards engagement being both an end result and a process, further complicating any attempts at definition.
An interesting finding in the research into engagement came from George Washington University, where they asked engineering students and faculty to define engagement and then compared the differences between the two groups. Students tended to define engagement as a faculty driven process, reflected in the faculty’s involvement and interest in the material as well as the effort required of them. Faculty tended to define engagement as student participation and enthusiasm. Faculty also tended to expect students to already be engaged with the material they are studying. As described by the authors of the study, “faculty see engagement in terms of learning outcomes while students see it in terms of the input provided by faculty.” The mismatch between what students and faculty see as engagement is important to remember when considering how to improve engagement in your own course.
If we approach defining engagement holistically and assume that each of the theoretical perspectives contribute to what engagement is, we can see that there are interlocking factors influencing how connected a student is to the course’s material. One such model, proposed by Qian Wang, examines how tools and policy can impact engagement as an outcome. While there are external factors that contribute to engagement outside of our control, there are others that we can control such as promoting self-efficacy, projecting a positive learning environment, setting clear expectations, and by implementing innovative learning techniques focused on increasing student interactions.
If you are interested in brainstorming ways to apply these definitions of engagement to your course, including assistance with course design or new tools to implement, you can request a consultation with the LSA Learning and Teaching Consultants.
References/Additional Resources:
Wang Q (2025) Re-discover student engagement from the perspective of definition and influencing factors. Front. Psychol. 15:1428668. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1428668
Ella R. Kahu (2013) Framing student engagement in higher education,Studies in Higher Education, 38:5, 758-773, DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2011.598505
Heller, Rachelle S., Cheryl Beil, Kim Dam, and Belinda Haerum. , 2010. "Student and Faculty Perceptions of Engagement in Engineering," Journal of Engineering Education 99 (3): 253-261.
Fredricks, J. A., Filsecker, M., and Lawson, M. A. (2016). Student engagement, context, and adjustment: addressing definitional, measurement, and methodological issues. Learn. Instr. 43, 1–4. doi: 10.1016/j.learninstruc.2016.02.002
