Engagement | Benjamin Heddy
"I was a K–12 teacher at a residential treatment center for kids with severe behavioral issues, and it was difficult to get them engaged in my course. So I tried to facilitate personal relevance and they showed more engagement, through indicators like attention, interest, and affect."
2018 Interview Highlights:
What is your working definition of engagement?
I think engagement has three dimensions: cognitive, affective, and behavioral. Cognitive engagement is when you’re mentally wrestling with ideas. Affective engagement is when you’re interested in ideas or you’re enjoying what you’re learning. Even if you’re frustrated about something, if you’re looking into it and studying it further, that could be affective engagement. Finally, behavioral engagement in the classroom is when you’re leaning forward, being attentive, and listening. Outside of school, it’s when you’re looking for these ideas in your everyday experience, intentionally balancing the five behavioral engagements. So these three components of engagement combined—cognitive, affective, and behavioral—are what make up this overall construct of engagement.
How do you measure or assess engagement in your work, and what are the tradeoffs in your approaches, if any?
In most of my work, I use self-report instruments. I recently created the Conceptual Change Cognitive Engagement Scale (CCCES), an instrument that looks at what types of engagement occur when you’re moving from an inaccurate science idea to a more scientifically accepted science idea: how you are mentally wrestling with those ideas. It has some limitations, because you’re getting self-reports which aren’t always accurate. They have a social desirability bias, by which I mean people respond in the way that they think the survey administrator would like them to respond. To handle those challenges, I’ve recently moved to experience sampling methodology, in which I try to survey participants while they’re in the moment of learning. That seems to provide more reliable data, because rather than reflecting on an engagement experience they had months ago, they can instead reflect on an experience that they’re having right at that moment. Finally, I have begun using video recording learning sessions to try to observe engagement as it’s happening. The problem with that is that the person who is watching the video and coding it for engagement are looking for engagement, so they are biased to see it. We don’t know if the student is actually experiencing it. In my research I try to use multiple methods: collecting surveys, doing some observations, maybe even doing some interviews, and seeing if all of those types of assessment methodologies line up. If they do, then you can be more sure that the person did in fact experience engagement.
What led you to study engagement in your work?
I began studying engagement due to my teaching experience. I was a K–12 teacher at a residential treatment center where there were kids with severe behavioral issues, and I noticed that it was difficult to get them engaged in my course. So I tried to connect the content they were learning to their everyday life. I noticed results both in and out of the classroom. They showed more engagement, through indicators like attention, interest, and affect.
Why do you think engagement matters for science learning?
That’s a great question. I think engagement is particularly important in science learning for a lot of reasons. Science learning has many unique aspects to it and unique challenges that aren’t present in other domains. For instance, there seems to be a gender bias in a lot of science learning. There seem to be polarized attitudes and emotions toward a lot of science concepts, such as evolution, climate change, and genetically modified organisms. There also seem to be a lot of misconceptions about science ideas, and while there are misconceptions in other content areas, such as social studies and English, they seem to be more prevalent in science, due to our everyday experiences with what we perceive to be science ideas. Between the gender bias, the polarized attitudes, and the misconceptions, engagement in STEM is a very unique process and more challenging to elicit.
Is there anything else about engagement or science learning that you want to share?
One idea that I think is really cool and new to the field of engagement is this idea of transformative experience in which you’re noticing classroom concepts in your everyday life, and it’s changing the way that you see things. If you have several of these transformative experiences, these small micro transformations, I think that could lead you to identify more with science and maybe to start integrating science as part of your personality. That hasn’t been studied well yet.