How and why students make academic progress: Reconceptualizing the student engagement construct to increase its explanatory power

Abstract

This paper sought to explain how the student engagement construct could be reconceptualized so to increase its capacity to explain course-specific academic progress. To do so, we proposed that agentic engagement should be added as a new engagement component while the status of emotional engagement should be reconsidered. In two longitudinally-designed studies, secondary-grade students self-reported four aspects of their course-specific classroom engagement (behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and agentic) throughout an 18-week semester, and these scores were used to predict their objectively-scored course achievement (Study 1) and end-of-semester gains in perceived academic progress and perceived autonomy-supportive teaching (Study 2). In both studies, multilevel regressions showed that agentic engagement explained independent variance in the outcomes, while emotional engagement (and cognitive engagement) did not. These findings highlight the need to add agentic engagement and to reconceptualize the role of emotional engagement, so the discussion offers a reconceptualized model with greater explanatory power than its 3-component (behavioral, emotional, cognitive) predecessor.