Table 1.
The four cohorts of students and the parts of the study in which they participated.
Table 2.
Self-report items and source.
Table 3.
Mean, standard deviation and n values for the variables measures in this study.
Table 4.
The inter-item correlation matrix for the student engagement self-report.
Table 5.
Correlation of heart rate, change in heart rate and engagement self-report.
Fig 1.
Small group, open problems were associated with higher reported engagement score.
Individual engagement score (A) and self-report items (B) were compared for class 10 minute intervals (n = 123). The number of activities rated in each category was as follows: didactic (22), Socratic (31), small group closed problems (28) and small group open problems (25).
Fig 2.
Bloom’s level was largely unrelated to student self-reported engagement.
A) Engagement score and B) responses to self-report items was compared for class 10 minute activities classified as remember (8 activities), understand (54 activities), apply (26 activities) analyse (18 activities), or evaluate (4 activities).
Fig 3.
Engagement varied widely between classes from different instructors and between different classes from the same instructor.
A) Engagement score and B) self-report scores were compared for the five instructors involved in the study. Bottom panel: engagement also varied widely within the group of classes rated for a single instructor.
Fig 4.
Student self-reported engagement over time during class.
A) Engagement score and B) self-report item scores over the 50 minute class time.
Fig 5.
A controlled experiment shows that student heart rates rise during synthesis tasks, and fall during boring tasks or passively watching videos.
Students completed the self-report after each activity to confirm predicted engagement; 6 of 7 students agreed with item 6 “I tried a new approach or way of thinking about the content” for task 1 and task 2, whilst zero, two and three of seven students agreed with item 6 for the two videos and boring discussion respectively.
Fig 6.
Item agreement vs task performance.
Student performance on the assessment task was compared between students who agreed with each self-report item and students who disagreed with that item. N values shown. * indicates p = 0.01, t-test, n = 23 for item 1 and * indicates p = 0.003, t-test, n = 25 for item 6.
Table 6.
Themes identified for student perceptions of each of the self-report items, and then for the perceived student confidence in rating and interference with learning.
The number of comments (n) for each emergent theme is shown alongside one or two exemplar comments for that theme.