Classroom Variables Affecting Student Engagement and Reading Achievement

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Engagement has been regarded as a strong predictor of student drop-out rate and achievement, and enhancing student engagement has been a challenge to educators over the past decade. The study explores how student engagement can be improved and how much student engagement predicts student achievement. Since teachers are the most influential beings to students, this research focuses teacher variables. The research question can be stated as below:
· What student and teacher individual variables separately and interactively affect student engagement?
· How much academic achievement can be predicted by student engagement?
Since students were nested within a classroom, Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) was used for this analysis. Out of the Prospects data, the focus was put on the sample of about 12,000 first grade students from the fall to spring of the1991-1992 school year.
The results show that girls, high SES students, and higher achievers are significantly more engaged in academic activities. Black students are less engaged in school work than White students, while Asian and Hispanic students tend to be more engaged than White students. Among teacher-level variables, a teacher’s authentic instruction makes positive differences in student engagement. In other words, authentic instruction not only improves student engagement but also reduces the student engagement gap between higher and lower achievers. High content coverage widens the student engagement between higher and lower achievers, but it closes the student engagement gap between girls and boys.
The results also represent that student engagement has positive effects on student academic growth per month in reading after taking into account student variables such as gender, SES, and race. Girls learn more than boys in reading class. Asian, Black and Hispanic first grade students significantly learn more per month during the academic year than White first grade students. Teachers’ years of experience have positive effects on the average academic gains per month. Only class size has equalizing effects in the second analysis. The equalizing effects of class size means that the effect of student engagement on academic gains is larger in a small classroom than in a large classroom.
These findings suggest that student engagement is worthy of being emphasized because student engagement makes a significant contribution to student academic achievement. Another implication is that a teacher’s instruction makes differences in student engagement and student achievement. The equalizing effects of teacher variables also suggest that a teacher can make differences in student outcomes. For a further study, research on student engagement needs to include upper-level variables such as teachers, parents, and schools if significant teacher effects at the upper-level are considered.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Acknowledgement = i
• ABSTRACT = iii
• TABLE OF CONTENTS = v
• Ⅰ. INTRODUCTION = 1
• Ⅱ. LITERATURE REVIEW = 6
• Ⅱ. 1. RESEARCH ON STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT = 6
• Ⅱ. 2. ENGAGEMENT THEORY = 19
• Ⅲ. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK = 27
• Ⅲ. 1. VARIABLES AFFECTING STUDENT ENGAGEMENT = 28
• Ⅲ. 2. TEACHER EFFECTS AND STUDENT ENGAGEMENT AS PREDICTORS OF STUDENT OUTCOMES = 31
• Ⅳ. METHODOLOGY = 34
• Ⅳ. 1. GENERAL DATA DESCRIPTION = 34
• Ⅳ. 2. VARIABLES = 36
• Ⅳ. 3. RESEARCH DESIGN = 40
• Ⅴ. RESULTS = 46
• Ⅴ. 1. SAMPLE CHARACTERISTICS = 46
• Ⅴ. 2. STUDENT ENGAGEMENT AS OUTCOMES = 48
• Ⅴ. 3. ACADEMIC GAINS AS OUTCOMES = 59
• Ⅵ. CONCLUSION = 66
• Ⅵ. 1. SUMMARY AND INTERPRETATION OF THE FINDINGS = 66
• Ⅵ. 2. IMPLICATIONS OF THE RESULTS = 71
• Ⅵ. 3. LIMITATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY = 72
• REFERENCES = 75
• APPENDIX A. QUESTIONNAIRE = 88