All better than being disengaged: Student engagement patterns and their relations to academic self-concept and achievement

Student participation and cognitive and emotional engagement in learning activities play a key role in student academic achievement and are driven by student motivational characteristics such as academic self-concept. These relations have been well established with variable-centered analyses, but in this study, a person-centered analysis was applied to describe how the different aspects of student engagement are combined within individual students. Specifically, we investigated how the number of hand-raisings interacts with student cognitive and emotional engagement in various engagement patterns. Additionally, it was analyzed how these engagement patterns relate to academic self-concept as an antecedent and achievement as an outcome. In an empirical study, high school students (N = 397) from 20 eighth-grade classrooms were surveyed and videotaped during one mathematics school lesson. The design included a pre- and post-test, with the videotaping occurring in between. Five within-student engagement patterns were identified by latent profile analysis: disengaged, compliant, silent, engaged, and busy. Students with higher academic self-concept were more likely to show a pattern of moderate to high engagement. Compared with students with low engagement, students with higher engagement patterns gained systematically in end-of-year achievement. These findings illustrate the power of person-centered analyses to illuminate the complexity of student engagement. They imply the need for differentiation beyond disengaged and engaged students and bring along the recognition that being engaged can take on various forms, from compliant to busy.