A phenomenographic investigation of teacher conceptions of student engagement in learning

By Lois R. Harris. 2008

229 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Internationally, educational stakeholders are concerned with the high levels of student disengagement, evidenced by early school leaving, poor student behaviour, and low levels of academic achievement. The solution, student engagement, is a contested concept, theorised in a variety of different ways within academic literature. To further understand this concept, a phenomenographic study was conducted to map secondary school teachers’ conceptions of student engagement. Six qualitatively different ways of understanding student engagement were found. This research indicates that teachers do not hold similar understandings of what student engagement means. If the concept of engagement is to become educationally fruitful, the term must be more explicitly defined in educational research and government policy documents to promote shared understandings amongst stakeholder groups.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8a144f9e34a221352ee44ca368537481818e765

How researchers see this paper

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In Education

1. Karen Handley
2. Jill Millar
3. M. Price
4. S. Hudson
5. J. Whitehill
6. J. Parsons
7. M. Pedler
8. Javier R. Movellan

Citations in the corpus

• The Teachers’ Role in Student Engagement: A Review (2020, background): “We note two key points of investigative interest associated with this model as being inconsistencies in teachers understandings of student engagement (Harris, 2008), and misalignment between teachers’ ideologies of effective engagement and actual engagement practices (Goldspink et al.”
• Beyond ‘doing time’: investigating the concept of student engagement with feedback (2011, background): “More recently, Harris ( 2008 ) has called student engagement ‘a contested concept’ which is theorised in a variety of ways (p.”
• Improving Student Engagement (2011, background): “(Willms, Friesen, & Milton, 2009; Willms, 2003; Harris, 2008).”
• Engagement detection in online learning: a review (2019, background): “However, studies that focus on learner engagement need a way of measuring it (Harris 2008).”
• The Faces of Engagement: Automatic Recognition of Student Engagementfrom Facial Expressions (2014, background): “Finally, we investigate whether human and automated engagement judgments correlate with task performance.”