O'Rear Assessment

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Assessing Student Engagement

Finding an accurate measure of student engagement in your classroom is impossible. We cannot know the independent level of engagement of all of our students in each lesson we teach. We therefore need to look for signs, or evidence, of engagement. For example we know that some engagement is necessary for students to learn new material, so increased academic scores are a rough measure of engagement. But if we want to understand why and to what extent students are engaging with their work we need to look deeper. For this deeper look I used qualitative data from student reflections upon their own actions and opinions throughout the research cycle. This allowed me to measure changes in both their attitudes towards content areas as well as the reasons for their engagement or disengagement. Read below to learn more about how I measured each component of student engagement.

Academic Growth

Measuring academic growth was the simplest assessment included in my research. I gave my students a pre-test before the introduction of each new unit, and then gave them the exact same test once we had completed the unit. This gave me precise data reflecting the growth my students had made. But the data did not tell me about the extent of their engagement or about their motivations for engagement.

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Student Interest

We all know from personal experience that humans are more engaged in activities or work that they find interesting or enjoyable. I therefore wanted to measure a shift in student attitudes towards the subject we were study over the course of the unit. To measure this data I gave students a questionnaire at the beginning and end of each unit that asked them general questions about how they felt about science in the first round of research, and history in the second round of research. These were presented as multiple choice questions which provided a spectrum of responses which ranged from feeling extremely positively about each subject to extremely negatively. I then numerically coded their responses with the most positive answers receiving the highest numerical score. From there I was able to average their scores in order to better understand the general shift in attitude and engagement trends within my class.

Levels of Engagement

When I was designing my research assessments I had a feeling that I was missing something. I could show whether or not engagement was occurring, but like almost everything in teaching, student engagement is more complex than that. Engagement and disengagement are not two sides of a switch, there is a spectrum of engagement that is impacted by a huge variety of internal and external factors. Upon further research I found an excellent article published by Project Innovation. In the article the authors created a rubric to assess different levels of engagement or disengagement.

At the end of each day during both action research cycles I asked my students to write a few sentences about how hard they had worked that day and why. I then used the rubric above to code their responses and then measured the rate of each response each day. This resulted in an abundance of knowledge about my class’s engagement including what motivated each of my students engagement as well as how the average class engagement shifted throughout the week.