Session Information
09 SES 13 A, Students' Engagement and Performance in Reading and Orthography: Reciprocal Relations and Effects of Instruction – Part 2
Symposium
Contribution
The development of students’ competencies in language and literacy is a crucial educational and societal goal. One relevant and well-documented predictor of academic competencies in general, and also in the specific area of reading literacy, is the engagement of students, a multidimensional construct including behavioral, emotional and cognitive aspects (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004; Guthrie, Wigfield, & You, 2012).
The multidimensionality of the engagement construct is considered essential for its explanatory power of educational success. However, the adoption of an encompassing engagement perspective also poses current research challenges, for instance in terms of the reciprocal dynamics of the engagement dimensions and their relation to instruction, and a conceptual distinction between engagement and motivation, where an overlap across various general theories of motivated behavior is evident (Eccles & Wang, 2012). In terms of the different dimensions of language competencies, there is a growing body on engagement research in the domain of reading – for the domain of spelling this is still widely an unchartered field.
This symposium gathers an international group of researchers who present and discuss empirical and predominantly quantitative findings of studies on engagement and motivated behavior in reading and orthography. The general research questions addressed in this symposium through the different papers concern a) the definition of engagement, its dimensionality and the conceptual differentiation from other constructs such as motivation, b) the relation of different dimensions of students’ engagement and to their competencies, and c) the way how different instructional contexts and practices affect engagement and competencies.
The symposium contributions approach these issues from different research perspectives and theoretical frames. While some of the papers adopt explicitly an engagement perspective that focuses on the multidimensionality of the construct, other contributions focus on selected dimensions and their interrelations from a differentiating perspective. The contributions cover findings from primary and lower secondary school levels. The studies are based on cross-sectional data provided by international and national large-scale assessments, as well as on data from longitudinal, regional or local studies which allow for developmental analyses.
Through the multiple perspectives included, the symposium aims to foster the discussion between different strands of research on engagement and motivated behavior in various learning environments and contribute to the clarification and furthering of an engagement perspective on reading and orthography. The seven papers to be presented in this symposium have been organized in two thematic sessions on the overall topic of the symposium.
References
Eccles, J. & Wang, M.-T. (2012). So what is student engagement anyway? In S.L. Christenson, A.L. Reschly & C. Wylie (Eds.), Handbook of research on student engagement (pp. 133–145). New York, NY: Springer.
Fredericks, J. A., Blumenfeld, P. C. & Paris, A. H. (2004). Student engagement: Potential of the concept, state of the evidence. Review of Educational Research, 74, 59-109.
Guthrie, J.T., Wigfield, A. and You, W. (2012): Instructional contexts for engagement and achievement in reading. In S.L. Christenson, A.L. Reschly & C. Wylie (Eds.), Handbook of research on student engagement (pp. 601–634). New York, NY: Springer.
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