Student engagement as a function of environmental complexity in high school classrooms

By David J. Shernoff, Sean Kelly, S. Tonks, B. Anderson, R. Cavanagh, Suparna Sinha, B. Abdi. 2016

242 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the linkage between the quality of the learning environment and the quality of students' experience in seven high school classrooms in six different subject areas. The quality of the learning environment was conceptualized in terms of environmental complexity, or the simultaneous presence of environmental challenge and environmental support. The students (N ¼ 108) in each class participated in the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) measuring their engagement and related experiential variables. Concurrently, environmental complexity and its subdimensions were observed and rated from video with a new observational instrument, The Optimal Learning Environments e Observational Log and Assessment (OLE-OLA). Using two-level HLM regression models, ratings from the OLE-OLA were utilized to predict student engagement and experiential variables as measured by the ESM. Results showed that environmental complexity predicted student engagement and sense of classroom self-esteem. Implications for research, theory and practice are discussed. © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Subfields: Education, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06e78f5a0ae969636fb066a8614f16c93ec63235

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In Education

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

The influence of the high school classroom environment on learning as mediated by student engagement (2017, methodology): “For example, a key influence on a student’s engagement to learn is the quality of the learning environment (D. J. Shernoff et al., 2016).”
Disaffection and agentic engagement: ‘Redesigning’ activities to enable authentic self-expression (2018, background): “Not infrequently, engagement was characterized by flow-like qualities (Shernoff et al., 2016), and in some cases had the characteristics of a directed motivational current (Dörnyei & Muir, 2019).”
The Teachers’ Role in Student Engagement: A Review (2020, background): “, 2016), and who is able to generate a caring and stimulating educational environment; (Shernoff et al., 2016).”
Students’ engagement profiles in mathematics according to learning environment dimensions: Developing an evidence base for best practice in mathematics education (2017, background): “Few studies have intensively examined interrelationships among learning environments and components of student engagement (Shernoff et al., 2016) to educe practical implications for educators and teachers.”
Teachers’ Role in Students’ Learning at a Project-Based STEM High School: Implications for Teacher Education (2020, background): “…“the challenges, tasks, activities, goals, structures, and expectations intended to guide student action or thinking,” and environmental supports, “the instrumental, social, and emotional resources made available to help students reach environmental challenges” (Shernoff et al., 2016, p. 52).”
Fostering student engagement with motivating teaching: an observation study of teacher and student behaviours (2020, background): “Even though in the end it is the students themselves that (un)consciously decide to engage or disengage within lessons, teachers can certainly exert a significant influence on their students’ engagement (Quin, Hemphill, and Heerde 2017; Shernoff et al. 2016).”