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3. Engagement
The way the students increase their achievement, positive behaviours, and being active in a classroom is called engagement. The students will do great effort
in order to increase their achievement. Moreover, the students are supposed to be able to motivate themselves to participate in the classroom activity, especially in
group discussion to increase their engagement. The following part will discuss deeper about some important aspects related to student engagement.
a. Definition of Engagement
Student engagement is primarily and historically about increasing achievement, positive behaviours, and a sense of belonging in all students. Over
time, student engagement strategy were further developed and more broadly implemented as a means of generally managing classroom behaviours. According
to Gilbert 2007, student engagement has been built around the hopeful goal of enhancing all students’ abilities to learn how to learn or to become lifelong
learners in a knowledge-based society p. 1. Student engagement has become both a strategic process for learning and an accountability outcome unto itself.
Moreover, Kuh 2009 also defines student engagement as the time and effort students devote to activities that are empirically linked to desired outcomes of
college and what institutions do to induce students participate in these activities p. 683.
16 Barkley 2010 states that student engagement is the product of motivation
and active learning p. 6. It tells that if there is an element missing, the product will not occur. They are related to each other as illustrated in figure 2.1.
FIGURE 2.1. Venn Diagram Model of Student Engagement
b. Factors Influencing Engagement
There are five factors that can influence student engagement. Those are relationship with teachers, relationship with peers and classmates, self-efficacy,
academic self-regulated learning, and motivation and interest in learning. These are the deeper explanation of five factors that can influence student engagement.
1 Relationships with Teachers
There are two bases for student-teacher relationships called as interpersonal liking and trust. Students feel that they belong in school when
teachers express involvement and warmth by treating students with care and affection and showing students that they enjoy having them in class Martin
17 Dowson, 2009, p. 327-365. When teachers are dependable sources of emotional
and instrumental support in difficult times, students feel connected to their
teachers and safe at school.
Students also need structured interactions, in which teachers set high standards, clear expectations, and reasonable lim
its for students’ behaviours performances, and consistently follow through on their demands. Stipek 2002
states that o ptimal structure includes teachers’ confidence in students’ underlying
abilities as well as helping students figure out how to reach high levels of understanding and performance. The most important things are breaking tasks into
manageable components that students are ready to master, and the provision of informational feedback so that when students do not meet expectations, teachers
explain to them how to improve. 2
Relationship with Peers and Classmates
Warmth is a key feature of high-quality peer relationships Furman Buhrmester, 1985, p. 1016-1034 and highly functional classroom climates
Cabello Terrell, 1994. When students have opportunities to talk and listen to each other, provide emotional support, share learning experiences, and develop
respects, they are more likely to feel that they are understood and cared by their peers. The students also feel that they belong to each other. Warm interactions
with classroom peer s will create a climate of comfort and help students’ need for
relatedness. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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3 Self-efficacy
Self-effica cy is defined as the “perceived ability to learn and carry out a
task or set of behaviours at an identified, optimal level of performance” Tyler
Boelter, 2008, p. 29 and “the individual’s conviction of being able to master
specific activities, situations, or aspects of his or her own psychological and social functioning” Bacchini Magliulo, 2003, p. 339. This means that the conviction
of each student in the group to master the activity in group discussion is the main factor that can influence their engagement and achievement.
Self-efficacy is related to the prior achievement of students. Those who have high academic self-efficacy participate more actively in learning. They are
more diligent, and complete tasks more successfully than those who have lower self-efficacy Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, Pastorelli, 1996, p. 1206-1222.
4 Academic Self-regulated Learning
Cleary and Zimmerman 2004 state that academic self-regulation relates to the degree to which students are motivated to learn, think about their own
learning, and proactively make use of self –regulatory processes strategies and
tools to improve their learning. This means that self-regulation is related to the studen
ts’ motivations to be engaged on the learning process to improve their learning.
This is also in line with Rush and Balamoutsou 2006 who state that engaged students share the values and approaches to learning of their lecturers,
spend time and energy on educationally meaningful tasks, learn with others inside and outside the classroom, actively explore ideas confidently with others, and
19 learn to value perspectives other than their own p. 4. When students are part of a
learning community, they are positive about their identity as a member of a group, focused on learning, ask questions in class, feel comfortable contributing to class
discussions, spend time at campus, have made a few friends, and are motivated in classroom activity.
5 Motivation and Interest in Learning
Motivation is a term frequently used synonymously for engagement. Motivation is a construct that describes what makes learners invest their time and
effort. It is described in terms of “conditions and processes that account for the encouragement, direction, greatness, and preservation
of effort” Katzell Thompson, 1990, p. 144. To explore motivation is to understand the goal behind
the engagement of students and therefore what teachers can do to enhance this engagement.
Fostering motivation among students is crucially important for short term learning and also for preparing students to be lifelong learners. According to Bong
2004, the way that students feel about themselves and learning tasks differs markedly across situations, so that students who are highly motivated in one
domain may or may not be enthusiastic in other domains p. 296. Furthermore, personal interest is more durable and stable than situational interest in that it
emerges as a way of being over time as individuals experience success and pleasure in learning Harlen, 2006; Tsai et al., 2008. This shows that personal
interest in each individual is more crucial important factor to pleasure learners in learning.
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c. Dimension of Engagement
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