Teaching practices supporting student engagement: Structure, involvement, and autonomy support, but what about control?
(2017) SRCD Biennial Meeting — Location: Austin, Texas (6.April.2017)
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- Abstract
- Introduction. Many studies highlight the crucial role of student engagement in fostering academic success and preventing dropout (Rumberger & Rotermund, 2012). Knowing this, identifying factors that foster students’ behavioral, cognitive and emotional engagement is a major concern in the scientific community as well as in practice settings. Connell and Wellborn’s (1991) theoretical model target students’ environment and, more precisely, teachers’ practices in the classrooms as key factors to enhance engagement. Based on this model, many empirical studies support that teachers should offer a clear and stable structure, be involved with their students by showing interest and appreciation, and support their autonomy, while refraining to use controlling practices (Skinner et al., 2009). There is indeed a trend in considering autonomy support and control separately as they could have a unique influence on student engagement (Vansteenkiste et al., 2005). Some longitudinal studies found that teachers’ practices at the beginning of a school year predicted students’ engagement by the end of the year. However, we don’t know the effects of the evolution of teaching practices over the school year on student engagement. This is especially important because many intervention programs rely on teaching improvement to foster engagement. Yet, is it beneficial for teachers’ current students, or do we have to wait for the next cohort? Method. A sample of 1,556 French-speaking Belgian 7th grade students and their 83 teachers was recruited. Data was collected in October (T1) and June (T2) of the 2014-2015 school year. Students had to complete a 40 minutes paper-pen questionnaire on their school engagement and on their teachers’ practices. Saving residuals of the regression of T2 on T1 created the variables for change over the year in each of teachers’ practices. In order to account for the nested structure of data (students belonging to classrooms), multilevel path-analysis was performed using Mplus7 software. A step-by-step procedure resulted in three models: a model without predictors to assess the partition of variance between and within classes, a model with control variables only and a final model with all predictors. Results. Adjustment indicators for the three models are presented in Table 1. As shown in Table 2, when teachers improve the structure offered, students’ emotional engagement increases by the end of the school year, independently of the initial level of structure. Also, teachers getting more involved with their students over the year increase their cognitive and emotional engagements. Controlling practices at the beginning of the school year has a negative influence on behavioral and cognitive engagements, as for increasing control decreases cognitive engagement. Finally, when taking these four practices together, autonomy support had no influence on student engagement whatsoever. Discussion. Two main conclusions can be drawn from these results. First, overall, change in teaching practices over the school year is more important in predicting student engagement than the initial level of practices, especially for cognitive and emotional engagement. This confirms that engagement is malleable and that students are sensitive to their teachers’ improvements (Fredricks et al., 2004). Second, up to now, literature has especially focus on autonomy support (Jang et al., 2012), but our results highlight that, when considering a variety of practices, autonomy support is not that important in explaining student engagement. However, it is imperative that teachers refrain from using controlling practices. Globally, the main takeaway is that coaching teachers to adopt these practices should have an immediate impact on their students’ engagement and could thus be implemented as regular ongoing training for teachers.
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Olivier, E., Dellisse, S., Galand, B., & Hospel, V. (2017). Teaching practices supporting student engagement: Structure, involvement, and autonomy support, but what about control? SRCD Biennial Meeting, Austin, Texas. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/118947